UN Women’s work on women’s economic empowerment has a broad and ambitious mandate and aims to strengthen women’s economic rights and respond to pressing global needs. This independent corporate thematic evaluation was undertaken to assess the relevance, effectiveness, coherence, efficiency, and sustainability of UN Women’s contributions to women’s economic empowerment by advancing gender responsive laws, frameworks, policies, and partnerships, and proposes recommendations and insights to strengthen this area of work.

This guidance tool aims to explain the practical steps towards enhancing the quality of women’s land rights data and statistics for data producers, analysts, and researchers. In doing so, it addresses critical gaps in the quality of the design, collection, analysis, management, and dissemination of data and statistics on women’s land rights. This tool is for use by data producers and data users alike.

This report examines the roles of women in fisheries and aquaculture in countries of the Indian Ocean Rim Association (IORA) and the challenges and opportunities for their economic empowerment. The report provides a set of recommendations for policymakers and other stakeholders to further advance gender equality and women’s economic empowerment in this sector.

This second edition, co-published by UN Women and OHCHR, aims to provide guidance to lawmakers and policymakers, as well as civil society organizations and other stakeholders, on supporting the adoption and effective implementation of laws, policies, and programmes to respect, protect, and fulfil women’s rights to land and other productive resources. The publication also provides recommendations for realizing women’s rights to land and other productive resources.

This rapid assessment examines how the impacts of COVID-19 are threatening women’s ability to access justice. The assessment reflects challenges faced by women and girls of diverse backgrounds and socio-economic groups, including those experiencing overlapping disadvantages and those facing amplified challenges in humanitarian settings. Cross-regional and local experiences are highlighted, and quantitative data is utilized where available.

This manual provides step-by-step guidance to Parties to United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) on integrating gender issues and promoting gender equality in the design of transformative land degradation neutrality (LDN) projects. It builds on work launched by UN Women, the UNCCD, and the International Union on the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) in advising governments on transformative efforts to avoid, reduce, and reverse land degradation through gender- and socially equitable means.

This report provides reviews of the activities undertaken by Member States and United Nations entities to enable women and girls, especially the poorest and most marginalized, in rural areas to improve their livelihoods, well-being and resilience in a changing climate.

UN Women, in partnership with Unilever, developed this guide to support the implementation of the “Global Women’s Safety Framework in Rural Spaces” (GWSF). The guide aims to provide support to producers on how to practically implement three main areas of the GWSF, including promising practices, case studies, and tools.

Across sub-Saharan Africa, the agricultural sector remains critical to local and regional economies. Based on original research in five countries (Ethiopia, Malawi, Rwanda, Uganda, and United Republic of Tanzania), this policy brief shows that gender gaps in agricultural productivity do not arise because women are less efficient farmers but because they experience inequitable access to agricultural inputs, including family labour, high-yield crops, pesticides, and fertilizer.

The new Global Women’s Safety Framework adapts UN Women’s longstanding initiative on Safe Cities and Safe Public Spaces for women and girls through incorporating experience in the tea sector in rural spaces. With its strong focus on prevention of violence against women and girls in public spaces, including harassment, the Framework helps to build a common understanding in the tea sector that is applicable to other commodity sectors in agricultural value chains.

Access to justice is critical for the effective implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. “A practitioner’s toolkit on women’s access to justice programming” was developed by UN Women, UNDP, UNODC and OHCHR to stimulate bolder gender-responsive justice interventions. It harnesses experiences, lessons learned, and promising practices for creating non-discriminatory and inclusive justice systems, empowering women and girls to claim and fully realize their rights.

This paper traces the restructuring of rural families’ agricultural production, the intra-household division of labour, and land usage in the interim between the global oil price rise of 1979 and its precipitous fall by 2015. It was produced for UN Women’s flagship report, “Progress of the world’s women 2018”, and has been released as part of the UN Women discussion paper series.

More than one third of the Earth’s land is currently degraded, affecting 2.6 billion people. Land degradation impacts men and women differently, making it imperative to address the persistent gender inequalities that fuel women’s extreme poverty. This paper analyses land degradation with a gender perspective and concludes with recommendations for the gender-responsive implementation of the Convention to Combat Desertification.

Few programmes for economically empowering rural women in India have focused seriously on farming—the one occupation in which the women have most experience. This paper examines whether group farming can enable women farmers to overcome resource constraints and gain economically.

This paper looks to our understanding of the gendered implications of rural land dispossession through a comparative analysis of five cases that were driven by different economic purposes in diverse agrarian contexts. It identifies some of the common gendered effects of land dispossession, and demonstrates ways in which the gendered consequences of land dispossession vary qualitatively across cases. It was produced for UN Women’s flagship report, World Survey on the Role of Women in Development 2014: Gender and Sustainable Development. It is now also released as part of the UN Women discussion paper series.

This paper explores gender differentials in labour market outcomes covering key areas such as occupational segregation, informality, part-time work and gender wage gaps, based on data from recent labour force surveys collected in Cameroon and Mali. It was produced for UN Women’s flagship report Progress of the World’s Women 2015–2016, and is released as part of the UN Women discussion paper series.

Focusing on grantee case studies in Sudan, this research series offers a more nuanced look at the opportunities and barriers to women’s economic empowerment in three fragile contexts. Through area-based research, good practices and lessons learned, it outlines the local gender dimensions of fragility and offers a set of context-based recommendations to scale interventions that help women realize greater empowerment, equality and inclusive development.

Focusing on grantee case studies in Lebanon, this research series offers a more nuanced look at the opportunities and barriers to women’s economic empowerment in fragile contexts. Through area-based research, good practices and lessons learned, it outlines the local gender dimensions of fragility and offers a set of context-based recommendations to scale interventions that help women realize greater empowerment, equality and inclusive development.

Focusing on grantee case studies in Guinea, this research series offers a more nuanced look at the opportunities and barriers to women’s economic empowerment in three fragile contexts. Through area-based research, good practices and lessons learned, it outlines the local gender dimensions of fragility and offers a set of context-based recommendations to scale interventions that help women realize greater empowerment, equality and inclusive development.

This brief summarizes the Fund for Gender Equality's three-country research series which focuses on grantee case studies in Guinea, Lebanon and Sudan. It offers cross-cutting highlights from the three full-length research briefs which comprise the series, including area-based findings, good practices and lessons learned. It also offers key conclusions and recommendations that aim to help women realize greater empowerment, equality and inclusive development.