Sustainable Development Goal 5 recognises that promoting gender equality and empowering women is crucial to tackling poverty and improving the lives of the world’s poorest people.
That's why women, who make up the majority of people in poverty, are at the heart of our work to strengthen the ability of poor and marginalised people to demand and defend their rights.
So we seek to empower women and women's groups in many of our projects in the countries where we work - such as helping to get women into politics in Yemen, strengthening women's organisations in Somaliland, or tackling gender based violence in Central America.
Our on going UK campaigning for a fairer world for women and girls demands a bigger role in political, environmental and social decision-making for women living in fragile states.
And we ensure that all our policy and campaigns work focuses on promoting the needs of women - such as our work on climate change and water, which highlights the key role of women as water managers (something we pushed for in our work on the Rio+20 conference on sustainable development).
Read stories about the gender focus of our work.
Progressio's gender policy
An independent evaluation of Progressio, carried out in 2010 for the UK government, said Progressio has a "serious commitment" to promoting women's rights and empowering women. The evaluation report says: "Progressio seeks to be not only gender aware but also gender transformative."
To make sure this happens, we always include gender impacts in all our development projects in the countries where we work - and monitor these impacts in our six-monthly monitoring reports under our Regular Impact and Capacity Assessment M&E system (see our transparency section for more information).
And to ensure that we embed a gender focus in all our work, our internal gender working group has produced a gender training manual to give all new staff and development workers a comprehensive understanding of the issue and how to implement it in their work.
Read our gender policy - it sets out what we are doing to promote gender justice in our work.
