Report / White Paper

In 2005, UNDP launched a system-wide initiative to strengthen the organization’s work on gender mainstreaming.

Gender equality and women’s empowerment are human rights that lie at the heart of development and the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals. As the UN development agency, therefore, empowering women is a prerequisite for success, affecting all aspects of our work.  

The report provides recommendations for MPs, constituents and for Parliament.  Primary amongst these are that MPs need to develop a policy for the use of email and strategies for digital media that define the target audience and connect with their offline strategy.

This two-pager highlights UNDP's take on parliamentary development, discussing in particular the importance of the gender dimension and the need to get more women in parliaments.

The cases presented in this report clearly demonstrate that, where there is a genuine commitment to gender equality, concrete steps can be extremely eff ective in bringing more women into elected offi ce.

As part of its efforts to strengthen the capacity of parliaments to promote gender equality, the IPU convened a seminar for members of parliamentary bodies that deal with gender matters.

This publication was prepared after studying the preliminary drafts and reports of the thematic committees of the Constituent Assembly and of the Constitutional Committee to assess whether or not all of the issues to do with women’s rights have been incorporated.

Debates on women’s issues and gender relations in the Arab region have been going on for some time now.

This is the keynote address by Vidar Helgesen, Secretary-General, International IDEA, at the Roundtable in Cairo on June 2, 2011.