

Gender equality – equal rights and opportunities for women and men, girls and boys – is central to all areas of our work. We have longstanding experience of promoting gender equality, both as an integrated part of our projects and through stand-alone interventions.
It is important to also consider other barriers to participation and opportunities. These might include issues such as ethnicity, caste, disability and others.
Traditionally development work applied a needs-based approach, considering the responsibility to support particular individuals (by extension, those who cannot help themselves). The Human Rights-Based Approach (HRBA) to development has changed that focus, assisting the poor or marginalised to assert their own rights to existing resources and to share these more equally.
Limits on available funding, geographic barriers and probably most importantly, power inequities, mean that in practice, a HRBA is a work in progress.
However, FCG has been active in supporting governments and communities in many countries to sensitively consider rights and design rights-based approaches.
While these themes are cross-cutting in all our work, they often require targeted actions in order to achieve traction and equitable results.