Improvement of the Situation of Women in Rural Areas

A/RES/62/136View PDF

Who adopted this document and its mandates?

A Resolution of the General Assembly, under agenda item 63a Advancement of women, published in 2008.

What other versions does this mandate have?

14 versions · 1983–2014

This is an older version — the most recent is A/RES/68/139

Year	Symbol	Title	Word length	Text similarity
2014	A/RES/68/139	Improvement of the situation of women in rural areas	2,380	70%Compare
2012	A/RES/66/129	Improvement of the situation of women in rural areas	1,949	46%Compare
2010	A/RES/64/140	Improvement of the situation of women in rural areas	2,265	86%Compare
2008	A/RES/62/136	Improvement of the situation of women in rural areas	2,017	55%Compare
2006	A/RES/60/138	Improvement of the situation of women in rural areas	1,574	67%Compare

Which reports were submitted under this mandate?

6 reports · 2005–2015

Year	Symbol	Title	Mandate resolution
2015	A/70/204	Improvement of the situation of women in rural areas report of the Secretary-General	A/RES/68/139
2013	A/68/179	Improvement of the situation of women in rural areas report of the Secretary-General	A/RES/66/129
2011	A/66/181	Improvement of the situation of women in rural areas report of the Secretary-General	A/RES/64/140
2009	A/64/190	Improvement of the situation of women in rural areas report of the Secretary-General	A/RES/62/136
2007	A/62/202	Improvement of the situation of women in rural areas report of the Secretary-General	A/RES/60/138

What’s in this document?

27 operative paragraphs

Takes note of the report of the Secretary-General;¹⁴

¹⁴A/62/202.

Urges Member States, in collaboration with the organizations of the United Nations and civil society, as appropriate, to continue their efforts to implement the outcome of and to ensure an integrated and coordinated follow-up to United Nations conferences and summits, including their reviews, and to attach greater importance to the improvement of the situation of rural women, including indigenous women, in their national, regional and global development strategies by, inter alia:

Creating an enabling environment for improving the situation of rural women and ensuring systematic attention to their needs, priorities and contributions, including through enhanced cooperation and a gender perspective, and their full participation in the development, implementation and follow-up of macroeconomic policies, including development policies and programmes and poverty eradication strategies, including poverty reduction strategy papers where they exist, based on internationally agreed development goals, including the Millennium Development Goals;

Pursuing the political and socio-economic empowerment of rural women and supporting their full and equal participation in decision-making at all levels, including through affirmative action, where appropriate, and support for women’s organizations, labour unions or other associations and civil society groups promoting rural women’s rights;

Promoting consultation with and the participation of rural women, including indigenous women and women with disabilities, through their organizations and networks, in the design, development and implementation of gender equality and rural development programmes and strategies;

Ensuring that the perspectives of rural women are taken into account and that they participate in the design, implementation, follow-up and evaluation of policies and activities related to emergencies, including natural disasters, humanitarian assistance, peacebuilding and post-conflict reconstruction, and taking appropriate measures to eliminate all forms of discrimination against rural women in this regard;

Integrating a gender perspective into the design, implementation, follow-up and evaluation of development policies and programmes, including budget policies, paying increased attention to the needs of rural women so as to ensure that they benefit from policies and programmes adopted in all spheres and that the disproportionate number of rural women living in poverty is reduced;

Investing in and strengthening efforts to meet the basic needs of rural women through improved availability, access to and use of critical rural infrastructure, such as energy and transport, capacity-building and human resources development measures and the provision of a safe and reliable water supply and sanitation, nutritional programmes, affordable housing programmes, education and literacy programmes and health and social support measures, including in the areas of sexual and reproductive health and HIV/AIDS treatment, care and support;

Addressing the specific health needs of rural women and taking concrete measures to enhance and provide access to the highest attainable standards of health for women in rural areas, including in such areas of sexual and reproductive health as pre- and post-natal health care, emergency obstetric care, family planning information and increasing knowledge, awareness and support for the prevention of sexually transmitted diseases, including HIV/AIDS;

Designing and implementing national policies that promote and protect the enjoyment by rural women and girls of all human rights and fundamental freedoms and creating an environment that does not tolerate violations of their rights, including domestic violence, sexual violence and all other forms of gender-based violence;

Ensuring that the rights of older women in rural areas are taken into account with regard to their equal access to basic social services, appropriate social protection/social security measures, equal access to and control of economic resources, and empowerment of older women through access to financial and infrastructure services, with special focus on support to older women, including indigenous women, who often have access to few resources and are more vulnerable;

Developing specific assistance programmes and advisory services to promote economic skills of rural women in banking, modern trading and financial procedures and providing microcredit and other financial and business services to a greater number of women in rural areas, in particular female-headed households, for their economic empowerment;

Mobilizing resources, including at the national level and through official development assistance, for increasing women’s access to existing savings and credit schemes, as well as targeted programmes that provide women with capital, knowledge and tools that enhance their economic capacities;

Integrating increased employment opportunities for rural women into all international and national development strategies and poverty eradication strategies, including by, inter alia, expanding non-agricultural employment opportunities, improving working conditions and increasing access to productive resources;

Taking steps towards ensuring that women’s unpaid work and contributions to on-farm and off-farm production, including income generated in the informal sector, are recognized and supporting remunerative non-agricultural employment of rural women, improving working conditions and increasing access to productive resources;

Promoting programmes to enable rural women and men to reconcile their work and family responsibilities and to encourage men to share equally with women household and childcare responsibilities;

Considering the adoption, where appropriate, of national legislation to protect the knowledge, innovations and practices of women in indigenous and local communities relating to traditional medicines, biodiversity and indigenous technologies;

Addressing the lack of timely, reliable and sex-disaggregated data, including by intensifying efforts to include women’s unpaid work in official statistics, and developing a systematic and comparative research base on rural women that will inform policy and programme decisions;

Designing and revising laws to ensure that, where private ownership of land and property exists, rural women are accorded full and equal rights to own land and other property, including through the right to inheritance, and undertaking administrative reforms and other necessary measures to give women the same right as men to credit, capital, appropriate technologies and access to markets and information;

Supporting a gender-sensitive education system that considers the specific needs of rural women in order to eliminate gender stereotypes and discriminatory tendencies affecting them;

Invites the Commission on the Status of Women to continue to pay due attention to the situation of rural women in the consideration of its priority themes;

Requests the relevant organizations and bodies of the United Nations system, in particular those dealing with issues of development, to address and support the empowerment of rural women and their specific needs in their programmes and strategies;

Stresses the need to identify the best practices for ensuring that rural women have access to and full participation in the area of information and communications technology, to address the priorities and needs of rural women and girls as active users of information and to ensure their participation in developing and implementing global, regional and national information and communications technology strategies;

Encourages Member States, the United Nations and relevant organizations of its system to ensure that the needs of rural women are mainstreamed into the integrated process of follow-up to the major conferences and summits in the economic and social fields, in particular the Millennium Summit, the World Summit on Sustainable Development, the International Conference on Financing for Development, the Follow-up International Conference on Financing for Development to Review the Implementation of the Monterrey Consensus, which is to be held in Doha in the second half of 2008, the 2005 review and appraisal of the progress achieved in implementing all the commitments made in the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action2 and the outcome of the twenty-third special session of the General Assembly3 and the 2005 World Summit;

Calls upon Member States to take into consideration the concluding comments and recommendations of the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women concerning their reports to the Committee when formulating policies and designing programmes focused on the improvement of the situation of rural women, including those to be developed and implemented in cooperation with relevant international organizations;

Decides to declare that 15 October of each year shall be officially proclaimed and observed as the International Day of Rural Women;

Requests the Secretary-General to report to the General Assembly at its sixty-fourth session on the implementation of the present resolution.

Improvement of the Situation of Women in Rural Areas

Who adopted this document and its mandates?

What other versions does this mandate have?

Which reports were submitted under this mandate?

What subjects does this mandate have?

What’s in this document?

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