UNDP's Development Futures Series Briefs and Working Papers

Paid domestic work employs many women in developing countries. Paraguay, where 94 percent of domestic workers are women and more than 90 percent of these jobs are informal, represents an extreme case of a problem that is common throughout the globe. These workers lack access to social security and generally endure precarious working conditions. What are the different legal, institutional, social and gender barriers that prevent domestic workers from having greater access to social security? Drawing on different sources of data from Paraguay, including the voices of both domestic workers and their employers, this study shows how persistently low levels of social security coverage in this sector are a product of complex interlocking factors: discriminatory cultural and gender beliefs, lack of accurate information and knowledge about social security, the low bargaining power of informal domestic workers and the low capacity for labour inspection that prevail in the sector. Based on these observations, the conclusions lay out guidelines to design integrated public policies for the sector’s formalization.

Promoting entrepreneurship, technology adoption, and gender equality is essential for economic growth. However, women still face significant hurdles in Africa, hindering their entrepreneurial pursuits. To overcome this, gender inclusive institutions are needed. This article focuses on challenges women encounter in entrepreneurship, including market systems favouring men and the widening digital gender gap in sub-Saharan Africa. Recommendations are provided to empower women through entrepreneurship, employment and digitalization, fostering a more equal economy and improved socio-economic conditions.

This policy brief outlines the power of responsible digital payments in promoting financial inclusion for women. Despite the progress in recent years, 740 million women still lack access to financial services. The factors behind this are a lack of access to formal types of ID, limited financial capability and inadequate service design, among many other constraints against women. This brief emphasizes the opportunity and the importance of removing the structural barriers to women’s economic and financial participation. It offers actionable recommendations for the key steps that policymakers and other stakeholders can take to prioritize women in their efforts toward digital financial inclusion.

The policy brief highlights the essentiality of women in agriculture and their potential role in shifting to sustainable agriculture, increasing food security and increasing agricultural productivity when they have access and ability to adopt innovative agriculture techniques such as climate-smart agriculture practices (CSA). This policy brief identifies key actions that can remove barriers or women in agriculture, including collection of gender disaggregated data for gender-sensitive planning, research analysis, advocacy for equitable access to productive assets, capacity building and awareness raising, and cross-sector collaborations to enable gender-equitable access to infrastructure, financial capital, productive assets and other services.

This paper aims to draw attention to the need to create an innovative measure that allows us to devel into women's poverty and its specificities. Only by performing an accurate analysis of women’s multidimensional poverty will it be possible to respond to their specific needs, identify the bottlenecks that prevent them from escaping poverty and make policy recommendations that are gender-sensitive in that regard. This paper presents a proposal for a Multidimensional Poverty Index with a focus on women in Latin America and the Caribbean, including results for 10 countries: Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Honduras, Mexico, Panama, Dominican Republic, and Uruguay. Estimates show that 28 percent of women in the analysed countries are multidimensionally poor. Uruguay and Chile exhibit the lowest incidence, below 10 percent, while in Honduras and El Salvador, more than 62 percent of adult women are multidimensionally poor.

This paper takes a closer look at the potentially huge economic and fiscal transition costs of global decarbonization in fossil fuel export-dependent economies. The paper identifies 40 heavily fossil fuel dependent economies. It is estimated that these countries will lose more than 60 percent in oil rents alone during the period 2023-2040 under a net-zero 2050 global decarbonization scenario compared to a ‘business as usual’ scenario reflecting stated policies. Local projections analysis provide evidence in support of possibly large adverse impacts on growth, government revenue and debt from a rapid fall in global fossil fuel demand in net-exporting emerging markets and developing economies. Finally, the paper discusses the mitigating domestic and international policy options to help countries.

Development discourse has long acknowledged the disproportionate impact of climate change and its implications for women and other marginalized social groups and has called for gender-responsive and inclusive climate action in international, national and local arenas. However, some countries are still pursuing development trajectories that fall short on gender sensitivity and social inclusion, worsening the impacts on women and marginalized groups while hindering resilience-building efforts. Given Sri Lanka’s heightened climate vulnerability and the exacerbated climate risks on women and other socially excluded demographics, and responding to the call for action in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) process and the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, this brief examines the level to which Sri Lanka’s development and climate policies and strategies integrate a gender and social inclusion approach in comparison to regional peers. Drawing on this work, this brief then provides recommendations to improve the climate policy landscape of Sri Lanka, including the gender-responsiveness of such work, to inform the country’s ongoing National Climate Change Policy revisions.

Climate change is already impacting negatively on the health and well-being of individuals across the globe, and this burden is likely to become more important and debilitating over time. Due to deep-rooted systemic inequalities, the growing negative consequences disproportionately affect diverse women, girls and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) people. The same structural and cultural factors that render them more vulnerable also limit their meaningful participation in mitigation and adaptation planning and marginalize their needs. This policy brief argues the case that to enable gender-transformative, intersectional and rights-based approaches, climate change, gender and other social determinants of health must therefore be considered and addressed jointly where possible. A systems-based approach can improve the understanding of important synergies and co-benefits, feedback loops, trade-offs and unanticipated consequences that are critical to priority-setting and effective responses. It can also foster critically needed cross-sectoral collaboration among the policymakers and advocates who work on climate, health and gender equality.

This brief provides an overview of the background, drivers, enablers and the impact of hate speech and identifies strategies to counter it, with a focus on the role of parliaments as a positive force for change. Of particular relevance are the concrete actions parliaments can take to address and mitigate the prevalence and impact of hate speech on those who are most vulnerable in society, including women, minorities and other underrepresented groups. The objective of this brief is to provide meaningful and practical guidance for parliaments and parliamentarians, as well as those who programmatically support them, on steps they can take to reduce and counter hate speech while fostering peace, constructive dialogue and trust.

The compounding crises of the COVID-19 pandemic, unchecked climate change and the war in Ukraine have caused severe negative economic, social and environmental consequences across the globe. We are facing a risk of a sharply diverging world with inequalities widening between developed and developing countries and within developing countries themselves, between urban and rural areas, rich and poor, men and women. This is especially true for the African continent, which has already suffered a loss of almost a decade of development gains. But, consistent with the findings of the UN Secretary-General’s Task Force on Digital Financing ‘People’s Money: Harnessing Digitalization to Finance a Sustainable Future’, the pandemic has put a spotlight on the role of digital finance and its accelerated applications in response to the crisis. A key question in this regard is how to use digital finance to improve economic participation, agency and resilience of people, facilitate cross-border trade and support sustainable development while addressing the risks of the widening digital divide. This paper will present the emerging applications of cryptocurrency in Africa, examine the evolving regulatory landscape and key accompanying risks and suggest potential policy considerations for leveraging this nascent, innovative instrument towards the advancement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) on the continent.