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Action Through Advocacy
Our advocacy agenda is driven by our evidence-based research on women and girls in the developing world. Currently, we are focusing on several policy areas:
Child Marriage | Violence Against Women | Women and Agriculture | Foreign Assistance Reform | Gender and AIDS | Millennium Development Goals
Child Marriage
Child marriage violates the human rights of girls, and its negative consequences – including persistent poverty, high illiteracy, increased domestic violence, and poor maternal and child health outcomes - ripple across entire societies.
ICRW’s research shows that community-based programs can effectively reduce early marriage by providing girls with education and life skills, educating families on the dangers of child marriage, and offering legal services, among other activities. ICRW urges U.S. policymakers to support the International Protecting Girls by Preventing Child Marriage Act of 2009, which would help expand these programs and reduce child marriage rates across the developing world.
Violence Against Women
Violence against women is a global problem that violates the basic human rights of women and impedes progress toward gender equality and women’s empowerment.
ICRW’s research seeks to end violence against women by addressing its root cause: gender inequalities. Our work explores solutions such as economically empowering women and working with men and boys to challenge attitudes about violence. ICRW supports Congressional efforts to pass the International Violence against Women Act, which would comprehensively incorporate solutions to end violence against women in U.S. foreign assistance programs.
Women and Agriculture
Rising food prices and the global economic crisis will increase hunger and malnutrition and further strain the struggling economies of the developing world.
Women produce a majority of the food in the developing world. Increasing women farmers’ access to nutritional and agricultural information and technologies will increase the food supply to their families and communities. ICRW is working with lawmakers to ensure that food security policies support the role of women in agriculture and include gender equity provisions to reduce hunger, food insecurity and malnutrition.
Foreign Assistance Reform
U.S. foreign assistance policies impact poor women and men around the world, but are not able to address modern challenges to global development efforts such as HIV and AIDS, climate change, and rising food and energy costs.
Prioritizing women and gender equality will enhance the impact of U.S. foreign assistance. ICRW advocates modernization of the 1961 Foreign Assistance Act to incorporate proven lessons of gender integration to create more effective and gender-equitable policies, programs, structures and budgets.
Gender and AIDS
Gender norms, including power inequalities, leave women more vulnerable to infection. A lack of property and inheritance rights, the acceptance of gender-based violence, and HIV - and AIDS - related stigma are just a few of the reasons women and girls are more vulnerable to HIV and AIDS.
Millennium Development Goals
In 2000, world leaders gathered and committed to eight concrete development goals, which are known as the Millennium Development Goals. The third goal is to promote gender equality and empower women, and ICRW works with the United Nations and the U.S. government to help
us accomplish this goal.