Strategic vision for girls and women: One year on

17 August 2012

In March 2011 the UK committed to put girls and women at the heart of our development assistance.

The Strategic Vision for Girls and Women outlined what this meant, identifying four ‘game changing’ pillars for action: get girls through secondary education, delay first pregnancy and support safe child birth, get economic assets directly to girls and women and prevent violence against women and girls.

It also emphasised the importance of the ‘enabling environment’ in tackling the underlying causes of gender inequality - including strengthening legal frameworks, working with boys and men as agents of change and promoting women’s role as leaders and decision makers.

The Strategic Vision for Girls and Women: One Year On sets out what has been achieved in the past 12 months.

In the last year alone, we have:

• Provided at least 740,000 women with access to financial services
• Improved the rights to land and property for at least 210,000 women
• Supported over 2.5 million girls in primary school, and 260,00 girls in lower secondary school
• Ensured that 500,000 births were delivered with the help of nurses, midwives or doctors
• Supported 1 million additional women to use modern methods of family planning
• Delivered an historic global breakthrough giving access to family planning for 120 million women at the recent London Summit on Family Planning

The report also identifies some of the challenges we face in taking this work forward.