5.1
End all forms of discrimination against all women and girls everywhere
Measured by
- 5.1.1Tier 1Whether or not legal frameworks are in place to promote, enforce and monitor equality and non‑discrimination on the basis of sex
4Planet
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United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 5
Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls.
Goal 5 is unusual in naming specific harms rather than general aspirations. Child, early and forced marriage and female genital mutilation are written into the targets by name, as are unpaid care work, participation in leadership, reproductive rights and equal rights to economic resources.
It is also unusual in how it is measured. Its indicators divide evenly between those with regular country reporting and those without, and several depend on specialised household surveys covering sensitive subjects. Where a country has not run that survey, the harm is not absent from the world — only from the chart.
Verified work by charities on 4Planet, tagged to Goal 5.
Official UN wording. Serious reporting maps work to targets rather than goals — the code is what belongs in a disclosure. Numbered targets are outcomes; lettered targets are means of implementation.
End all forms of discrimination against all women and girls everywhere
Eliminate all forms of violence against all women and girls in the public and private spheres, including trafficking and sexual and other types of exploitation
Worth knowing before you cite a Goal 5 figure.
Violence, child marriage and genital mutilation are measured through dedicated surveys that many countries run rarely or never. A blank in the series says nothing about prevalence, and reading it as a low value is the most common error made with this goal.
Prevalence figures come from what respondents disclose to an interviewer. Disclosure varies with survey method, interviewer training and social context, so cross-country comparison measures reporting conditions as much as underlying rates.
The discrimination target is assessed by whether legal frameworks exist to promote, enforce and monitor equality. A country can score well on the statute book while enforcement is negligible.
The framework is built on a male/female split, which is what makes cross-country comparison possible and also what limits it. Gender identity beyond that binary has no instrument anywhere in the agenda.
Across all 17 goals, 35% of assessed targets are on track or making moderate progress and 18% have regressed. Source: The Sustainable Development Goals Report 2025, UN DESA.
No 4Planet writing carries this goal yet. Read the rest of the blog.
We link to the UN's own material rather than re-hosting it.
Eliminate all harmful practices, such as child, early and forced marriage and female genital mutilation
Recognize and value unpaid care and domestic work through the provision of public services, infrastructure and social protection policies and the promotion of shared responsibility within the household and the family as nationally appropriate
Ensure women's full and effective participation and equal opportunities for leadership at all levels of decision-making in political, economic and public life
Ensure universal access to sexual and reproductive health and reproductive rights as agreed in accordance with the Programme of Action of the International Conference on Population and Development and the Beijing Platform for Action and the outcome documents of their review conferences
Undertake reforms to give women equal rights to economic resources, as well as access to ownership and control over land and other forms of property, financial services, inheritance and natural resources, in accordance with national laws
Enhance the use of enabling technology, in particular information and communications technology, to promote the empowerment of women
Adopt and strengthen sound policies and enforceable legislation for the promotion of gender equality and the empowerment of all women and girls at all levels
