Improvement of the situation of women in rural areas

Invites Member States, in collaboration with UN organizations and civil society, to continue their efforts by, inter alia: (a) investing in and strengthening efforts to meet the basic needs of rural women through capacity-building and human resources development measures; (b) designing and revising laws to ensure that, where private ownership of land and property exists, rural women are accorded full and equal rights to own land and other property; (c) integrating a gender perspective into the design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of development policies and programmes; (d) providing microcredit and other financial and business services to a greater number of women in rural areas; (e) pursuing the political and socio-economic empowerment of rural women; (f) placing a renewed focus on the issue of rural women within the context of the review and appraisal of the implementation of the Beijing Declaration and the Platform for Action adopted by the 4th World Conference on Women; (g) taking steps towards ensuring that women's unpaid work and contributions to on-farm and off-farm production, including income generated in the informal sector, are visible and recorded in economic surveys and statistics at the local and national levels; requests the Secretary-General to prepare a comprehensive report on the situation of rural women.

Adopted without vote, 83rd meeting

3 p.

Adopted at the 83rd plenary meeting, 17 Dec. 1999.