• Strengthen food, nutrition and agricultural policies and programmes, and fair trade relations, with special attention to the creation and strengthening of food security at all levels.
  
• Eliminate existing inequities and barriers to women in the workforce and enhance women's participation in all policy-making and implementation, as well as increasing their share of productive resources, including the ownership of land, the right to inherit property and access to credit.
  
• Generate jobs for women in the industrial, agricultural and service sectors through the establishment of more favourable climates for expanded trade and investment on an environmentally sound basis, along with greater investment in human resource development.
  
• Formulate and implement comprehensive population policies and programmes to support the objectives and actions of the Earth Summit's Agenda 21.

The Social Summit held in Copenhagen in March 1995 underscored the need of governments to take steps to provide livelihood opportunities for the poorest segments of society. In particular women need to be involved in the planning and implementation of policies that directly affect them. In short, women and men need to become genuine partners in sustainable development.

The Fourth World Conference on Women, held in Beijing in September 1995, emphasized the need for equality between men and women and called for the empowerment of women as one of the central development goals of the 21st Century. The ICPD Programme of Action includes a set of specific objectives for all countries, relating to health, women's status and social development.

These include:

• Universal access to reproductive health care including family planning and sexual health by 2015;

• Universal access to primary education by 2015; countries should try to close the gender gap in primary and secondary education by 2005;

• Infant mortality rate below 35 per 1000 live births and an under-five morality rate below 45 per 1000 by 2015;

• Reducing maternal mortality rates by one half of the 1990 levels by the year 2000 and halve it again by 2015;

• Increasing life expectancy at birth to 75 years or more by 2015.

Implementation of these goals will:

• Bring women at last into the mainstream of development; it will protect their health, promote their education, and encourage their economic contribution;

• Ensure that every pregnancy is intended and every child a wanted child;

• Protect women from the results of unsafe abortions;

• Protect the health of adolescents and encourage responsible behaviour; Combat HIV/AIDS;

• Promote education for all and close the gender gap in education;

• Protect and promote the integrity of the family.

As Dr Nafis Sadik, Secretary-general of the ICPD, noted: "The Programme of Action places women and men, and their families, at the top of the international development agenda." The challenge of the 21st century is to feed a world of between 8 and 10 billion people. Only the full involvement of women as equal partners can guarantee success.

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