Policy areas

Addressing gender inequality and discrimination is a critical aspect of the struggle against chronic poverty, and is often a difficult political issue that needs careful and urgent work. CPRC gender analysis has set out to understand the relationship between gender and chronic poverty and to develop gendered solutions to chronic poverty.

Research and policy

CPRC research and policy analysis on gender shows that progressive social change is likely to come through the following processes:

• Politics addressing gender inequality 
• Enhanced asset ownership by women, through property inheritance and other laws and practices
• Enhanced opportunities for young people, including young women and adolescent girls
• Enhanced reproductive health status
• Gender sensitive social protection

CPRC policy analysis shows that the post-2015 development framework needs to address gender inequality comprehensively and urgently. At the international level, this can be done through a stronger focus on measuring equality and progress towards it. At the national level, by fostering open and evidence-based debate that will create a stronger momentum for policy change on gender.  

The CPRC gender report includes policy recommendations to address some of the institutional arrangements which underlie gender inequality, and which currently  prevent girls and boys, young men and women, acting as more effective agents and enabling their families to escape poverty. The report contributes to filling a gap in knowledge about initiatives which are needed to tackle gender inequality and thereby address chronic poverty.

Key resources

Progressive social change

• Stemming girls’ chronic poverty: Catalysing development change by building just social institutions
  ^{Chronic poverty report}
• Chronic poverty, girls and social institutions
  ^{CPRC Policy brief}
• Progressive social change - women's empowerment
  ^{CPRC Policy brief 12}

Women, children and households

• Supporting civic activism among chronically poor women
  ^{CPRC Working paper 173}
• Living in the background: homebased women workers and poverty persistence
  ^{CPRC Working paper 97}
• Women exiting chronic poverty: empowerment through equitable control of households’ natural resources
  ^{CPRC Working paper 174}
  

Also see publications on gender, inheritance and IGT, and the gender matrix.