Empowering women and girls and achieving gender equality are crucial to creating inclusive, open and prosperous societies.  Gender inequalities, however, persist in many countries so it is important that we find new ways of addressing this issue.

There has been considerable progress in recent decades in supporting countries to acknowledge the importance of empowering women and girls, in order to promote greater equality in their relationships with men and boys, within their families and in society. While the international community recognises the important contribution gender equality can make to poverty reduction and inclusive growth, it also recognises that equality must be, above all, a matter of basic social justice.

We contribute to this agenda by funding projects that:

• support women and girls through skills development;
• support women and girls facing abuse, discrimination and disadvantage; and,
• support widows and the bereaved in hardship.