This toolkit is designed to help mayors – especially of small and medium-sized towns in the Global South – understand what equitable economic growth means for their city, and what kind of opportunities and constraints exist. The toolkit takes access to public goods as an entry point for municipalities that want to create a better environment for providing decent employment, and focuses specifically on those areas over which the municipality has some control.

1. Advocacy and Progressive National Legislation: StreetVendors in India
2. Market Traders and Legal Victories in Warwick Junction, Durban, South Africa
3. Legal Change for the Adoption of an Inclusive Recycling Model in Bogotá, Colombia
4. Social Mobilization and a New Legal Framework for Inclusion of Informal Recyclers in Solid Waste Management in Brazil
5. Global Standard Setting and Advocacy for Domestic Workers

This report is a call to action. To realize the Sustainable Development Agenda, there is a pressing need to step up actions to close gender gaps and ensure the full economic empowerment of women. After six months of fact finding, sharing best practices and consulting around the world, the Panel presents its findings about proven and promising actions to address gender gaps and accelerate progress. The High-Level Panel hopes that this report and its ongoing actions and commitments will serve as a call to action to men and women around the world to join together in a global campaign to achieve gender equality and women’s economic empowerment. Empowering women in the economy and closing gender gaps at work are central to the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Yet too many gaps persist. How to accelerate progress? Through concrete actions by individuals, businesses, governments, worker and employer organizations, civil society, and multilateral institutions to drive change by addressing systemic constraints. Expanding women’s economic opportunities is central to the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. More than two decades after the landmark 1995 United Nations (UN) Conference on Women in Beijing and with the unprecedented consensus on the 2030 Agenda, the global commitment to gender equality has never been stronger. For the first time in history, governments have set a concrete deadline for the elimination of gender inequality—the year 2030. And the potential gains for basic human rights, for human development and for economic growth have never been larger.

There has been remarkable advances in energy access for rural households. However, this research note argues that building the wider economy requires energy services that power new jobs and enterprises.

This resource guide provides practical guidance for designing, implementing and evaluating decentralisation reforms and local government practices to ensure they are as effective as possible. It also synthesises and presents current debates on the impact of decentralisation and local government on poverty reduction, service delivery and conflict as well as providing links to cutting-edge research and recent case studies.