Gender Equality And Poverty Reduction Through Growth

Gender equality and the empowerment of women and girls are widely recognized as key dimensions of human progress. Most development institutions and partner governments acknowledge this in laws, policies, institutional structures, and programming. When the Millennium Challenge Corporation developed its Gender Policy in 2006, its mandate was to address gender equality in the context of MCC's focused mission: poverty reduction through economic growth. Rather than adopting a rights-based perspective on gender equality, MCC's Gender Policy recognizes women as economic actors, and that gender inequality can be a significant constraint to economic growth and poverty reduction.1 The connection between poverty and gender inequality has been on the agenda of development practitioners, policy makers and researchers for over 30 years. Much progress has been made in the social sectors, such as health and education. Recently, gender equality has been directly linked to economic growth in the "smart economics" advocated by the World Bank. Research on the productivity impacts of inequalities in access to assets2 and in wages and employment empirically demonstrate these linkages.3 MCC recognizes that the relationships among growth, equality and poverty reduction are complex and multi-dimensional. Critical engagement across disciplines is required to find the best tools and methods for effectively taking these relationships into account in practice. The dynamics among MCC's priority on gender equality and its core principles of country ownership, policy performance and focus on results can also be complex, presenting tradeoffs. This paper, like others in the Principles into Practice series,4 describes how MCC and its partner countries address challenges that arise in practice within the context of an agency committed both to its core principles and learning from its experience.