Goal 3: Promote Gender Equality and Empower Women
Guyana has made very good progress towards promoting gender equality and the empowerment of women. The country met the target of eliminating gender disparity in primary and secondary education, and strives towards parity at the tertiary level. Employment of women is targeted for improvement and female political representation in Parliament has substantially increased.
More specifically the targets of having gender parity in primary and secondary education have been achieved since boys and girls are equally represented at these levels. Moreover, at the University level, there are twice as many girls as there are boys enrolled.
The proportion of women employed in the non-agricultural sector has increased from 29 percent in 1991 to 33 percent in 2006, signaling the opening up of labour markets to women. Female representation in Parliament has increased from twelve members (18.5 percent) in 1992 to twenty members (30.7 percent) in 2009. Women are well represented in public life generally and hold a variety of senior technical positions in the public service.
To further promote the equality of women in all spheres of life, Government’s priorities include ensuring the implementation of proactive legislation and various initiatives including micro-credit schemes and training programmes.
The table below shows the targets and indicators for Goal 3.
Table 1: MDG targets and indicators
| Goal 3: Promote Gender Equality and Empower Women |
|
| Targets | Indicators for monitoring progress |
| Target 3.A: Eliminate gender disparity in primary and secondary education, preferably by 2005, and in all levels of education no later than 2015 |
3.1 Ratios of girls to boys in primary, secondary and tertiary education |
