This Sourcebook was developed to provide readily available and usable gendersensitivematerials and resources to build local government capacity for sustainable, equitable and inclusive human settlements.

This report provides a gender review of a decade and a half of World Bank infrastructure lending for 1,246 projects. The objective of this review is to assess the status of and trends in gender integration in the World Bank infrastructure portfolio, and to establish a baseline for monitoring and enhancing gender integration in line with commitments made for the 2006 Gender Action Plan.

Until now, the United Nations Capital Development Fund’s (UNCDF) Gender Equitable Local Development (GELD) programme has not been presented within an explicit human rights framework. This is strange given that the human rights based approach to development (HRBAD) aims to ensure that all human beings can live their lives fully and with dignity. HRBAD is fundamentally about the healthy and full development of individuals and communities. In addition, one of human rights’ central concerns is that people have equal access to the benefits of society. Initiatives to realize human rights therefore give priority to the most marginalized - the poorest - in a society. It is those individuals who have most difficulty in securing the basics that are essential to living their lives with dignity. Women in all communities are disproportionately represented among the poor. Thus, human rights have gender equity as a central focus. Put another way, we are dealing with the feminization of poverty. We are dealing with the concept of equal access (to development). In short, we are dealing with those who need (and deserve) greater priority in access to infrastructure and supporting services in order to reach a point of equality.

UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown would surely love his political legacy to include a significant contribution to constitutional reform. Certainly he inherited, on succeeding Tony Blair in 2007, a substantial agenda of unfinished constitutional business: devolution, House of Lords reform, the electoral system, a bill of rights, a written constitution. Two years on, though, major progress on any of these ‘big’ topics seems most unlikely before a probable 2010 General Election. Which might mean a rather modest constitutional legacy, based mainly on bringing some prerogative powers under MPs’ scrutiny and control, and, in other comparatively minor ways, boosting the role of Parliament. One such low profile, though not unimportant, initiative is Brown’s revival of the Speaker’s Conference, a constitutional device that many supposed had become extinct with the creation in 2000 of the Electoral Commission.