Shocker: Poverty linked to discrimination against women

The United Nations said yesterday that poverty can’t be adequately addressed until it takes on social, economic and physical discrimination against women.

“Gender apartheid” could scuttle the global body’s goal of halving extreme poverty by 2015, the U.N. Population Fund’s annual State of World Population report said.

“We cannot make poverty history until we stop violence against women and girls,” the fund’s executive director, Thoraya Ahmed Obaid, said at the report’s launch in London. “We cannot make poverty history until women enjoy their full social, cultural, economic and political rights.”
The report said gender equality and better reproductive health could save the lives of 2 million women and 30 million children over the next decade – and help lift millions around the world out of poverty.
In 2000, the U.N. agreed to eight Millennium Development Goals, which include halving extreme poverty, achieving universal primary education and stemming the AIDS pandemic, all by 2015.
The report said one of the targets – promoting gender equality and empowering women – is “critical to the success of the other seven.”

Find out at the UNFPA.