Gender equality is one of the central challenges of the twenty-first century. The United Nations Millennium Development Goals, formulated in September 2000, mention strengthening gender equality and women’s rights as an explicit development goal. Poverty is not gender neutral. Throughout the world, women have less access to and little control over productive resources such as education, land, credit, and modern technologies. Thus, they can rarely overcome poverty through their own efforts.
Equality between men and women is a human right. Societies must enable women to have equal scope for action and involve them equally in the development process.

The gender approach emphasizes the structural causes of gender-based discrimination. These have their origin in the socially assigned female and male roles, which depend on the respective social, cultural, historical, and economic framework conditions. The English term gender refers to these assigned roles. They are linked to different rights and possibilities for women and men.
The goal of a gender approach is equality between men and women. To achieve equality, it is not enough to pay attention to gender-based roles and power relationships at certain points. Sex and other traits such as ethnicity, age, or social status that can form the basis for discrimination must be taken into account in a comprehensive and coherent manner.