Securing the Rights of Women and Girls: A Plan, and Its Test in 2026

Introduction

In much of the world women and girls still have fewer legal rights, less schooling, less income, less say in government and less protection from violence than men and boys. The World Bank’s 2026 survey of 190 economies found that women enjoy only about two-thirds of the legal rights of men, that laws supporting women’s economic participation are enforced only about halfway, and that none of the 190 economies gives women fully equal economic opportunity (World Bank). Nearly one in three women alive has experienced partner or sexual violence (WHO), and about 260,000 women died from complications of pregnancy or childbirth in 2023, mostly from preventable causes (WHO).

The problem is species-level in scale and runs through the others: hunger, poverty, war and displacement fall harder on women and girls, and the evidence that girls’ schooling reduces child marriage, fertility, child mortality and malnutrition makes women’s status one of the strongest levers on those larger problems (World Bank). Progress can also be reversed, as Afghanistan has shown by going from rising female enrolment to a formal ban on girls’ secondary schooling within a year of the Taliban’s return.

This essay sets out a seven-part plan and tests it against the events of 2025 and 2026; separate essays on this site cover displacement and education, which appear here only where they bear directly on women and girls.

Where things stand

The UN’s annual Gender Snapshot, released by UN Women and UN DESA on 17 September 2026, reports that not one indicator under Sustainable Development Goal 5, the gender equality goal, is on track for 2030 (UN Women).

Measure	Figure	Source
Women in extreme poverty, 2024	9.9% of women, against 9.5% of men	UN Women
Women and girls projected to be in extreme poverty in 2030 on current trends	351 million	UN Women
Women who have experienced partner or sexual violence in their lifetime	about 840 million, nearly 1 in 3	WHO
Women subjected to partner violence in the past 12 months	316 million, 11% of women aged 15+	WHO
Girls married before age 18	nearly 1 in 5	UN Women
Women alive today who were married as children	nearly 650 million	World Bank
Children and youth out of school, 2024	273 million, of whom about 133 million are girls	UN Women; Kashmir Observer (PTI, UNESCO GEM data)
Maternal deaths, 2023	about 260,000, one every two minutes	WHO
Women’s share of seats in national parliaments, 1 January 2026	27.5%	UN News
Unpaid care and domestic work	women and girls spend 2.5 times as many hours as men	UN Women

Some of these trends point in the right direction. The global maternal mortality ratio fell from 328 deaths per 100,000 live births in 2000 to 197 in 2023, a decline of about 40%, although the pace has slowed markedly since 2016 (WHO). Girls now enrol in primary and secondary school at the same rates as boys worldwide, with 136 million more girls in secondary school than three decades ago (Kashmir Observer). India cut the share of women married before 18 from 49.4% in 1993 to 22.3% in 2021 (World Bank).

Other trends are flat or worsening. The rate of partner violence has barely moved since 2000, falling by about 0.2% a year (WHO). At the current pace, parity in parliaments is 63 years away (UN Statistics Division). Nearly two-thirds of maternal deaths occur in fragile or conflict-affected countries (WHO). Bilateral aid for gender equality fell by 13% between 2023 and 2024, and funding for women’s rights organizations fell by 28% over the same period, before the larger cuts of 2025 had registered in the data (UN Women).

Part I: The plan

The plan has seven elements. Each names who acts, what they do and what the evidence shows.

1. Keep girls in school through secondary level

Governments in low-income countries, backed by donors and development banks, should make secondary schooling free and reachable for girls, with stipends conditional on attendance, schools within safe walking distance, separate sanitation and female teachers. A World Bank study estimated that barriers to girls completing 12 years of school cost countries between $15 trillion and $30 trillion in lost lifetime productivity and earnings, and that women with secondary education earn almost twice as much as women with none (World Bank).

2. End child marriage

National legislatures should set 18 as the minimum age of marriage with no exceptions for parental consent or custom, backed by birth and marriage registration and support for girls already married. Sierra Leone, where 30% of girls marry before 18, passed a law in 2024 making marriage of anyone under 18 a criminal offence (Human Rights Watch). In Colombia, where eight earlier bills had failed, the Senate approved a ban without exceptions in November 2024 (Equality Now). Law alone is insufficient; the practice is concentrated among the poorest households in 105 of 110 countries with data (World Bank), so cash support to poor families and access to secondary school belong in the same package.

3. Prevent violence and respond to it

Governments and local organizations should fund prevention programs that change community norms, and services for survivors such as shelters, legal aid, trained police and courts, and post-rape care. In 2022 only 0.2% of global development aid went to programs focused on preventing violence against women (WHO). The evidence for prevention is promising but thin. In the SASA! community mobilization trial in Kampala, Uganda, women in intervention communities were about half as likely to report physical partner violence in the past year as women in control communities, although the trial was small and the confidence intervals were wide (BMC Medicine).

4. Equal economic rights, including property

Legislatures should remove the laws that still restrict women’s work, pay, inheritance, land and business ownership, and governments should build what makes equal laws real, including land registries that record women’s names, courts that enforce inheritance rights, and childcare. The World Bank finds the gap between law and practice to be the larger problem, since laws supporting women’s economic participation are enforced only about halfway and only 4% of women live in countries close to full legal equality (World Bank). Because women do 2.5 times as much unpaid care work as men (UN Women), public childcare and eldercare are part of economic rights in practice.

5. Make pregnancy and childbirth safe

Health ministries, supported by donors and by UNFPA, WHO and UNICEF, should train and deploy midwives, keep supplies of the drugs that treat the leading causes of maternal death in stock, and provide voluntary family planning. The State of the World’s Midwifery 2021 report found that the world was short of 900,000 midwives, and that fully resourcing midwife-delivered care by 2035 could avert 67% of maternal deaths, 64% of newborn deaths and 65% of stillbirths, saving about 4.3 million lives a year (UNFPA). In crisis settings, where risk is highest, UNFPA’s 2026 humanitarian appeal for 41 countries asks for $1 billion (UNFPA). Abortion policy is a separate, contested question, discussed below.

6. Women in public decision-making

Parties and legislatures should adopt candidate quotas or reserved seats where representation is low, and electoral authorities and police should treat intimidation of women candidates as an electoral offence. Quotas work on their own terms: chambers with quota policies averaged 31% women among new appointments in 2025, against 23% in chambers without them (UN News). India’s reservation of a third of village council head positions for women created a natural experiment; Chattopadhyay and Duflo found that council heads “invest more in infrastructure that is directly relevant to the needs of their own genders” (Econometrica). Safety is a growing barrier: an Inter-Parliamentary Union survey found that 76% of women legislators had experienced violence or intimidation, against 68% of men (UN News).

7. Defend against reversal

Because rights that have been won can be withdrawn, the plan includes international accountability for the gravest abuses through the International Criminal Court and UN fact-finding bodies; sustained funding for local women’s organizations, which run most survivor services in crisis settings and defend existing laws; protection of national bodies such as women’s ministries and equality commissions; and household surveys, without which no one can tell whether child marriage, maternal deaths or violence are rising or falling.

Sequencing

In the first two years, emergency maternal and survivor services, data systems and women’s organizations come first. Legal reform, secondary schooling and midwife training proceed country by country over two to ten years, and equal legal status and near-parity in representation are goals for a generation.

What makes it stick politically

Durable gains have usually come when domestic coalitions carry the reform. The Gambia’s National Assembly voted 34 to 19 in July 2024 to reject a bill that would have repealed the country’s 2015 ban on female genital mutilation, after 42 legislators had backed repeal at an earlier stage in March. Gambian women’s groups led the campaign, with survivors testifying and religious leaders and elders drawn in (openDemocracy). Domestic opinion data can support reform even under hostile governments; in a 2025 UN Women survey in Afghanistan, 92% of respondents said it was important for girls to continue their schooling (UN Women).

Where reasonable people disagree

Abortion and “sexual and reproductive health and rights.” Many governments and citizens regard access to legal abortion as part of women’s health and rights. Many others, including many religious traditions, regard abortion as the taking of a human life and object to international texts or aid that could be read as promoting it. In the United States, every Republican administration since 1985 has imposed the Mexico City Policy and every Democratic administration has rescinded it. Supporters say US taxpayer money should not support organizations that perform or promote abortion; opponents, who call it the “global gag rule,” say it disrupts family planning services (KFF). A 2019 study in The Lancet Global Health found that abortion rates in sub-Saharan African countries more reliant on US aid rose by about 40% while the policy was in force, alongside a fall of about 13.5% in modern contraceptive use and a 12% rise in pregnancies, and that the changes reversed when the policy was rescinded (Center for Global Development). Supporters hold that the principle stands regardless of such effects. This plan takes no position on abortion law, which each society decides for itself, and concentrates on maternal care and voluntary contraception.

The meaning of “gender.” Governments disagree over whether international texts should define gender as referring to men and women or use it more broadly to include gender identity. In 2026 the United States proposed a UN-wide definition in the first sense, and the European Union blocked a vote on it (Council on Foreign Relations). The dispute now holds up texts on subjects, such as girls’ schooling, that no side opposes.

Sovereignty, religion and culture. Some governments hold that family law should follow religious law or custom and regard outside pressure as interference; others hold that equality under law is universal. Reform has often come from within religious frameworks, as in the Gambia, where campaigners enlisted religious scholarship and leaders.

Schooling as the main lever. Education is strongly associated with later marriage, but the association is not automatic. In Bangladesh girls average more than 12 years of schooling, yet about half still marry before 18 (World Bank). Some therefore argue for direct measures and jobs for young women ahead of further schooling.

Quotas. Supporters see quotas as the fastest proven route to representation. Critics say they override voters’ choices or produce token officeholders, and prefer removing barriers such as campaign costs and harassment.

Part II: The plan in the world of September 2026

Schooling: Afghanistan makes the ban permanent in practice

The Taliban shut girls out of secondary school in March 2022 and barred women from universities in December 2022. In August 2026 UNESCO reported that 2.4 million Afghan girls are now barred from secondary school, 200,000 more than a year earlier, and that the number could approach four million by 2030 (Al Jazeera). Before 2021, female primary enrolment had risen above 80% (UNESCO). The ban will also shrink Afghanistan’s future supply of female teachers and health workers; UN Women projects a loss of more than 25,000 by 2030 (UN Women), and the shortage of female nurses and doctors already limits women’s access to care.

Elsewhere, the funding base for girls’ schooling in crises is shrinking. In a July 2026 survey of 855 women’s organizations in 52 crisis-affected countries, eight in ten said they were seeing more girls drop out of school (UN Women).

Child marriage: laws advance in some places and regress in one

Afghanistan has moved in the opposite direction from Sierra Leone and Colombia. On 14 May 2026 the Taliban published Decree No. 18, a code on the judicial separation of spouses that sets no minimum age of marriage and describes how a child marriage may be annulled after puberty. UN experts said that by implying child marriage is permitted, the decree risks normalizing it, and that it will make it harder for women to leave abusive marriages because judges cannot grant a divorce on a woman’s request alone (Afghan Studies Center; UN Women). The deeper test is sub-Saharan Africa, where child marriage rates are highest, at about a third of women aged 20 to 24 (World Bank), and where the aid cuts described below are removing the cash and schooling support that the plan pairs with legal reform. In the July 2026 UN Women survey of women’s organizations in crisis settings, seven in ten reported an increase in forced marriage (UN Women).

Violence: war and funding cuts pull in opposite directions from the plan

Sudan is the clearest case of sexual violence used as a method of war. The UN Fact-Finding Mission for the Sudan said in July 2026 that the mass killings, abductions and gang rapes in El Fasher were distinct markers of genocide (GlobalSecurity). The companion essay on war discusses how narrow the accountability tools for Sudan remain.

At the same time the services that respond to violence are closing. UN Women reported in July 2026 that at least one million women and girls in conflicts and crises had lost access to critical support since January 2025 because of funding cuts, that nearly nine in ten women’s organizations surveyed could no longer meet current needs, and that 86% were seeing more gender-based violence in their communities (UN Women).

Economic rights: steady legal reform, weak enforcement

The economic element is holding up best. The World Bank counts 113 reforms in 68 economies between 2023 and 2025 (World Bank). Afghanistan shows the worst case: only 7% of Afghan women are employed, against 84% of men, and UN Women estimates the economic loss from excluding women at $920 million, or 5.8% of GDP, over 2024 to 2026 (UN Women). The food and fuel price shocks that followed the closure of the Strait of Hormuz after the Iran war began on 28 February add to the pressure; nine in ten women’s organizations in the UN Women survey reported growing poverty among the women they serve (UN Women).

Maternal and reproductive health: the element hit hardest by aid cuts

In April 2025 the UN agencies warned that the US and other aid cuts were already closing facilities, removing health workers and disrupting supplies of treatments for haemorrhage, pre-eclampsia and malaria (WHO). On 8 May 2025 the administration invoked the Kemp-Kasten amendment to withhold funding from UNFPA, citing UNFPA’s work with the government of China on family planning, although the review found no direct evidence of coercive practices by UNFPA itself (KFF). In January 2026 the United States announced its withdrawal from 66 international bodies including UNFPA (PBS NewsHour).

The Mexico City Policy was reinstated in January 2025 and then expanded on 27 January 2026 under a new framework, “Promoting Human Flourishing in Foreign Assistance,” effective 26 February 2026. The new rules extend the abortion restriction to US-based organizations, multilateral organizations and foreign governments, and to nearly all non-military State Department assistance, and add restrictions on diversity, equity and inclusion programs and on gender-identity-related activities. KFF estimates that $39.8 billion in foreign aid would be subject to the policy, compared with $7.3 billion under the first Trump administration and $300 million to $600 million under earlier administrations (KFF; Inside Government Contracts). The administration and its supporters describe the rules as keeping US funds away from abortion and from ideological programs; critics note that foreign organizations are barred from using non-US funds as well as US aid on the prohibited activities, and argue that providers of maternal care and contraception will have to choose between US funding and services paid for by other donors (Guttmacher Institute).

Estimates of the consequences vary with the assumptions. A modelling study in The Lancet Global Health in September 2025 projected that a complete end of US funding, without replacement by other donors, would cause about 140,000 additional maternal deaths from service shortages between 2025 and 2030, plus at least 200,000 more linked to 40 to 55 million additional unintended pregnancies across 51 countries (Lancet Global Health via PMC). These are worst-case projections that depend on how much other funders replace. UNFPA says more than 1,000 health facilities and mobile health teams it supported closed or came close to closing in 2025, and warns that without full funding up to 12 million women and girls in crisis settings could lose essential services in 2026 (UNFPA).

Afghanistan’s maternal mortality ratio stood at 638 deaths per 100,000 live births in 2024 (UN Women), more than three times the global average, while the pipeline of female medical staff is closed by the education ban.

Data: the monitoring system nearly went dark

The plan’s defensive element depends on data, and the main source of data on women’s health in poor countries was cut. The US government ended funding for the Demographic and Health Surveys Program in February 2025, after more than four decades of support. The surveys supply much of the evidence on maternal health, child marriage and partner violence in low- and middle-income countries. Emergency grants of $39 million from the Gates Foundation and $4 million from Bloomberg Philanthropies kept the program alive, but as of July 2026 it was narrower than before, with 15 surveys under way, and the Gates grant expires in 2028 (PRB).

Political participation: slower gains and new pressure on institutions

Representation is still rising, but slowly. Women held 27.5% of parliamentary seats on 1 January 2026, and the share of women among speakers of parliament fell from 23.7% to 19.9% in a year (JURIST). The 2026 Gender Snapshot found that six in seven countries are led by men, and that one in three national gender equality institutions had lost institutional power over the past two years, one in four had their operating budgets cut, and nearly one in ten had lost control of their budgets altogether (UN Women). These are the bodies that enforce the legal reforms counted above.

Accountability for Afghanistan

The plan’s accountability tools have been used, with limited effect so far. On 8 July 2025 the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for the Taliban’s supreme leader, Haibatullah Akhundzada, and its chief justice, Abdul Hakim Haqqani, for the crime against humanity of persecution on gender grounds (ICC; Wikipedia). The Taliban have continued to issue restrictions; UN Women counts more than 100 decrees affecting women and girls since August 2021 and describes the situation as the world’s most severe women’s rights crisis (UN Women; UN News). Fewer than one in five Afghan women returning from Iran and Pakistan earns an income (UN Women).

Beijing+30 and the breakdown of consensus

The 1995 Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action remains the main international framework for women’s rights. At its thirtieth-anniversary review in March 2025, the Commission on the Status of Women adopted a political declaration urging full and accelerated implementation of the Beijing agenda (UN Meetings Coverage; PMNCH). Supportive governments dropped references to sexual and reproductive health and rights to avoid a fight over “family rights” language, and the United States issued a statement objecting to specific provisions (IPI Global Observatory).

A year later the consensus broke. In March 2026, for the first time in the Commission’s history, its agreed conclusions, on access to justice for women and girls, were adopted by a recorded vote: 37 in favour, one against and six abstentions. The United States cast the only vote against, after its eight proposed amendments were rejected; it objected to language on sexual and reproductive health and rights, which it said implied abortion rights, and on intersectionality and diversity, and it sought a definition of gender as referring to men and women (Council on Foreign Relations). The adopted text calls for repealing discriminatory laws, including on child marriage, family law and property (UN Women).

The institutions that carry the Beijing agenda are also under review. The UN80 reform initiative has proposed merging UN Women and UNFPA; a strategic assessment judged the merger technically sound and projected savings of $32 million to $38 million a year once integration is complete (Health Policy Watch). Nine governments, including Canada, Brazil, Spain and Sweden, along with more than 1,400 women’s organizations, oppose the merger on the ground that it would weaken both mandates at a time of cuts (Development Today; Health Policy Watch). No final decision had been announced as of September 2026.

Part III: Revised priorities for the next 6 to 12 months

Applied to the conditions of September 2026, the plan points to six priorities, in order.

Fund emergency maternal care and survivor services in crisis settings. Close as much as possible of UNFPA’s $1 billion humanitarian appeal and fund local women’s organizations directly, starting with Sudan, the occupied Palestinian territory, Afghanistan and Yemen, the four largest country appeals. With US funding withdrawn, other donors and national governments must fill the gap.
Keep the data systems running. Put the Demographic and Health Surveys and similar household surveys on multi-year funding, so that maternal deaths, child marriage and violence remain measurable.
Hold the line in Afghanistan. Keep girls’ education and women’s employment as conditions in every engagement with the Taliban, support online and community schooling that reaches Afghan girls, and back the ICC process. The 92% public support for girls’ schooling inside Afghanistan is an argument that negotiators can use.
Protect prevention and accountability for sexual violence in war, beginning with Sudan, where evidence from El Fasher is fresh and the UN investigations are still active.
Defend national gender institutions and recent legal reforms against budget cuts and repeal attempts, following the Gambian example of domestic coalitions.
Rebuild agreement at the UN on the uncontested core. Maternal survival, girls’ schooling, child marriage and violence prevention command support across the divides that split the Commission on the Status of Women in 2026. Negotiating those items separately from the disputes over abortion and the definition of gender would let most of the agenda move, and decisions on the UN Women and UNFPA merger should be judged on whether they protect those functions.

Conclusion

The plan holds up against the events of 2025 and 2026. The effective measures are known: secondary schooling for girls, a firm minimum age of marriage, midwives and basic obstetric drugs, enforced laws on property and work, and women in positions of authority. India’s fall in child marriage and the 40% decline in maternal mortality since 2000 show what they achieve when applied.

The threats in 2026 are political and financial. The steepest decline in development aid on record has fallen heavily on maternal health, family planning and women’s organizations. Afghanistan has reversed two decades of progress in five years, and in Sudan sexual violence has been used against women and girls on a scale that UN investigators link to genocide. The Commission on the Status of Women, which had always reached its conclusions by consensus, resorted to a recorded vote. These events raise the cost of delay, because maternal deaths, early marriages and lost school years cannot be recovered later. The most important decisions of the next year are whether other donors replace the lost funding for maternal and survivor services, and whether governments that disagree about abortion and gender can still act together on the large part of the agenda they share.