Gender equality is no goal to be enshrined on merely one day each year. Even as we celebrate International Women's Day (Saturday, March 8), we know women's empowerment is an on-going project, one that affects every other aspect of a nation's development every day. The importance of gender equality is reflected in its inclusion as one of the eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) endorsed by every member nation of the United Nations. These simple, measurable goals inform all international development work. And empowering women is not just one of the goals; it plays a critical role in the achievement of the other seven goals as well. Every day, the cross-cutting importance of gender is made plain to the staff of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), which plays a lead role in monitoring international progress toward the MDGs. All over the world, where UNDP works, women are the poorest of the poor: disproportionately, women lack access to land, water and sources of energy; women lack access to education and other social services; and too often women are absent from decision-making, not only at the national, regional or local level, but even within their own families.

From the bedroom to the boardroom, too many women are deprived of their right to make choices in their own lives and influence the decisions made around them. Indeed, because the majority of the world's poor are women and girls, the failure to focus on gender has held back progress in development around the world. With only limited data disaggregated by sex, it is not easy to monitor progress toward the Millennium Development Goal on gender. Meanwhile, in those areas where key indicators and qualitative data are available, the gender differences are undeniable.

In the fight against HIV/AIDS, to give just one example, the great majority of those newly infected are young women. From the oil fields of Nigeria to the schools of Afghanistan, wherever women and girls are denied access to land, water, schools or other social services, it is entire families and communities that are adversely affected. This is why gender equality is key to the achievement of all of the MDGs. Not just because it is the right thing to do; it also critical for the achievement of virtually all other development goals.

So UNDP works to "mainstream" gender as a component of public planning and help countries make gender priorities a part of public policy at both the national and local level. For instance, in Mauritius, gender issues are now being addressed within the budgetary planning of both the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Social Security. In South Africa, we have supported programmes to build women's capacity for participation in local politics, where women have now reached the 13 percent threshold in local council elections. In Myanmar, UNDP is supporting efforts to improve local environmental management with an integrated approach that serves gender and poverty-reduction objectives at the same time. Other measures aimed at empowering women have now been mainstreamed in government planning in countries ranging from Turkey and Viet Nam to Mongolia and Morocco. Of course gender equality must go beyond the realm of governance. We have renewed our commitment at UNDP to gender equality and the empowerment of women so that this core objective is translated into results across all our practice areas and in all our programmes. In war-torn regions of Tajikistan, where 87 percent of all women have lost their livelihoods as a result of armed conflict, a credit financing programme supported by UNDP has grown into a training centre for business women. All of us have a stake in providing choices and opportunities for those who have never had them: education for girls who have been denied it; protection from abuse, at home and in the workplace, for wives and mothers who have had to endure it silently; access to real political and economic power for all women in every country. If we can achieve that, we will have created a better world for all our children, girls and boys alike.

Mark Malloch Brown, the UNDP Administrator, was delivered this message on International Women's Day