All over the world, women from poor households play a more critical role in income-earning and expenditure-saving activities that do women from better-off households. In the past decades, the relationship between household poverty and women’s paid activity has become stronger, partly in response to economic crises and the “push” into the labour market and partly in response to new opportunities generated by globalization. Improving women’s access to economic opportunities and enhancing returns on their efforts, therefore, will be central to the goal of poverty eradication and the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals.

This book explores the issue of gender inequality through the lens of the Millennium Development Goals, particularly the first one of halving world poverty by 2015.

THE AUTHOR

Naila Kabeer is Professorial Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex. She is a social economist and has been involved in teaching, research, and advisory work in the fields of gender, poverty, population, and social policy."

Creators

The Development Gateway Foundation (DG) is an independent not-for-profit organization, initially developed in the World Bank in July 2001. It helps to improve people’s lives in developing countries by building partnerships and information systems that provide access to knowledge for development. It exploits powerful and affordable information and communication technologies (ICT) that were previously unavailable to:

 Increase knowledge sharing;
 Enhance development effectiveness;
 Improve public sector transparency; and
 Build local capacity to empower communities.