The State of the World’s Children calls for   brave and fresh thinking to address age-old problems that still affect the most disadvantaged children. In particular, the report calls for innovation – and for the best and brightest solutions coming from communities to be taken to scale to benefit every child.

The study offers the latest and regional information and projections on several indicators of the labour market, including employment, unemployment, working poverty, gender gaps and vulnerable employment.

The 2014 Human Development Report “Sustaining Human Progress: Reducing Vulnerabilities and Building Resilience” shows that overall trends in human development are positive. Yet, people at all ages are also facing threats and challenges to their well-being, including by natural or human-induced disasters and crises.

The report highlights the critical role data and monitoring play in realizing children’s rights. Credible data, disseminated effectively and used correctly, make it possible to target interventions that help right the wrong of exclusion. Data do not, in and of themselves, change the world. They make change possible – by identifying needs, supporting advocacy, gauging progress and holding duty bearers to account. Making what’s possible real is up to decision-makers.

The findings of this assessment indicates that gender-related barriers pose significant obstacles to the uptake of services that prevent new HIV infections among children and keep mothers alive—obstacles that require urgent attention. Without dedicated attempts to overcome these gender-related barriers, current efforts will meet with limited success, and the needs and rights of both women and children will remain compromised.

The 2013/4 Education for All Monitoring Report shows why education is pivotal for development in a rapidly changing world. It explains how investing wisely in teachers, and other reforms aimed at strengthening equitable learning, transform the long-term prospects of people and societies.

The 2013 Human Development Report examines the rise of the south and identifies more than 40 developing countries that have done better than expected in human development in recent decades, with their progress accelerating markedly over the past 10 years.

Every day in developing countries, 20,000 girls below age 18 give birth. Nine in 10 of these births occur within marriage or a union. This has consequences on the health, education, employment and rights of an untold millions of girls. What are the challenges of adolescent pregnancy, and what can we do to ensure girls have a healthy and safe transition into adulthood?

This report examines the conditions of women’s engagement in the labour market, by estimating and analysing five key gaps, or gender differentials, between women and men which disadvantage women: unemployment, employment, labour force participation, vulnerability, and sectoral and occupational segregation.

The State of World Population 2012 explains why family planning is a right, examines the challenges in ensuring that all women, men and young people are able to exercise that right and suggests actions that governments and international organizations can take to give everyone the power and the means to decide freely and responsibly how many children to have and when to have them.

This report is a clarion call to decision-makers, parents, communities and to the world to end child marriage. It documents the current scope, prevalence and inequities associated with child marriage and highlights that by 2020, some 142 million girls will be married by their eighteenth birthday if current trends continue.

The State of Food and Agriculture 2010–11 makes the "business case" for addressing gender issues in agriculture and rural employment. The agriculture sector is underperforming in many developing countries, in part because women do not have equal access to the resources and opportunities they need to be more productive. Promoting gender equality is not only good for women; it is also good for agricultural development.

This twentieth anniversary United Nations Development Programme report finds long-term progress in health, education not determined by income; introduces new indices for gender, poverty, inequality.

The World’s Women 2010: Trends and Statistics is the fifth issue of The World’s Women and is being produced to coincide with the first-ever World’s Statistics Day. The report highlights the differences in the status of women and men in eight areas – population and families, health, education, work, power and decision-making, violence against women, environment and poverty. Analyses are based mainly on statistics from international and national satistical sources.

The release of the 2010 edition of the State of World Population report coincides with the tenth anniversary of UN Security Council resolution 1325, which recognizes and seeks to address the vulnerability of women and girls to violence during and after armed conflict, and the absence or low level of women’s representation in efforts to prevent war, build peace and restore devastated societies.

The Rural Poverty Report 2011 provides a coherent and comprehensive look at rural poverty, its consequences and the prospects for eradicating it. The report contains updated estimates by International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) regarding how many rural poor people there are in the developing world, poverty rates in rural areas, and the percentage of poor people residing in rural areas.

The report argues that reproductive health care, including family planning, and gender relations could influence the future course of climate change and affect how humanity adapts to rising seas, worsening storms and severe droughts. Women, especially impoverished women in developing countries, bear the disproportionate burden of climate change, but have so far been overlooked in the debate about how to address problems of climate change, the report concludes.

The theme for the World Survey in 2009 is “women’s control over economic resources and access to financial resources, including microfinance”.

Development strategies should be more culturally sensitive to the promotion of human rights, especially women's rights, theUnited Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) annual report 2008-2009 finds, warning that otherwise many projects in poor countries are likely to fail.

By 2030, towns and cities will be home to almost 5 billion people. The urban population of Africa and Asia will double in less than a generation. This unprecedented shift could enhance development and promote sustainability – or it could deepen poverty and accelerate environmental degradation. Women's empowerment and well-being are the pillars of sustainable cities.