Background

Women's empowerment offers a pathway out of extreme poverty and toward dignity and security – for women, their families and whole communities.

Women in the developing world cannot lift themselves up alone; they need the support and solidarity of women in developed nations to do so. Movements like this have historically proven to give a voice to the voiceless and create substantial and long-lasting societal change. One need only look to the women’s suffrage movement in the United States more than a century ago and the civil rights movement of the sixties as examples of what can be accomplished through the strength of solidarity. Because the majority of the world's poor are women and girls, the success of this women's empowerment movement is vital to achieving the UN Millennium Development goal of halving poverty by 2015.