Gender equality and women’s/girls’ empowerment are basic human rights that benefit not only individuals but also entire communities and society as a whole. They foster economic growth and reduce poverty and the impacts of poverty, improve health outcomes and reduce gender-based violence, open up education and training opportunities for both women/girls and men/boys — which in turn open up opportunities for decent work — and can contribute to environmental sustainability efforts. While many countries have made significant progress towards achieving gender equality, many gaps remain and, in addition, the social and economic consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic mean that many gains made are now at risk of being lost.

The Commonwealth of Learning’s (COL) Empowering Women and Girls project aims to improve the realisation of human rights for women and girls from disadvantaged communities in selected areas of five Commonwealth Member States: Bangladesh, Malawi, Mozambique, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. As part of this project, COL undertook a gender analysis of each of the five focus countries to assess the scope and extent of gender equality in them. The gender analysis used secondary data and the Harvard Analytical Framework, also known as the Gender Roles Framework. This framework is designed to allow researchers to use data to pinpoint and separate out differences in the lives and experiences of women/girls and men/boys — for example, the type of work each group does in the home, the community or farms, and the type and extent of access each group has to resources such as healthcare, land/house ownership and financial services. The findings that result from this type of analysis can be used for planning programmes to meet the specific needs of the target population.