Policy Engagement

This brief outlines the major challenges facing youth and highlights policy and program recommendations in the key issue areas of education and training, economic opportunities, and health and sexuality.

This brief assesses progress toward Millennium Development Goal 3, promote gender equality and empower women, by analyzing changes in the 12 indicators proposed by the U.N. Millennium Project Task Force on Education and Gender Equality and offers recommendations that can redouble global efforts to fulfill this worthy goal.

Child marriage is a harmful traditional practice that perpetuates an unrelenting cycle of gender inequality, sickness and poverty. ICRW outlines successful community interventions that reduce child marriage rates.

This paper is the product of a review of literature on issues of gender in the context of conflict and post-conflict reconstruction. It was prepared as background material for an international workshop on gender equity and peace building jointly convened by ICRW and the International Development Research Centre (IDRC). Key findings and research questions are presented in relation to the effective integration of gender concerns into policies and programs that shape post-conflict societies.

In addition to taking a narrow focus on income, poverty issues have typically been examined with a focus on discrete groups, such as children, women, rural, or indigenous people. In contrast, a broader focus on the interconnectedness of the lives of poor mothers, fathers, and children can lead to a greater understanding of the chronic poverty that is transmitted from one generation to the next. Meeting global poverty reduction goals will therefore require a closer look at how and why children born into poor families become poor adults and then raise children who also become trapped in a life of poverty. The Intergenerational Dialogue Project described in this report builds on this perspective, with the goals of expanding knowledge of and solutions to the transmission of poverty from one generation to the next.

This report examines the occurrence of female genital cutting (FGC), common rationales for its practice, and its prevalence. Efforts to eliminate the practice are also explored within the context of an emerging human rights framework. The final section of the document reports on the Promoting Women in Development (PROWID) International Consultation on FGC and makes recommendations on how practitioners, donors and policymakers can best enable communities to abandon the practice of female genital cutting.

After convening in September 2001, the Intergenerational Dialogue, organized by ICRW and UNICEF, drafted their Call to Action to urge more effective and informed action to overcome poverty.

En Español