The Global Emancipation of Womankind

"In fact, the very best predictor of a state's peacefulness is not its level of wealth, its level of democracy, of its ethnoreligious identity. The best predictor of a state's peacefulness is how well its women are treated."
"On issues of national health, economic growth, corruption, and social welfare, the best predictors are also those that reflect the situation of women."
"What happens to women affects the security, stability, prosperity, bellicosity, corruption, health, regime type, and (yes) the power of the state."
"The days when one could claim that the situation of women had nothing to do with matters of national or international security are, frankly, over."
Valerie Hudson, lead author, Sex and World Peace, 2012

"[Within five years' time] at least 95 percent of Canada's bilateral international development assistance investments will either target or integrate gender equality and the empowerment of women and girls."
Global Affairs Canada

With bicycles impoverished girls in Guatemala can travel long distances to get to school and stay at school. UNFPA Alejandro deLeon

A study produced by the McKinsey Global Institute two years ago stated that $12-trillion could be counted on to add to the world GDP simply through the advancement of women's equality. The study gathered the conclusions of various scholarly treatises all announcing that the most reliable predictor of a country's stability results from women's equality. The conclusion: the wider is the gender gap, the likelier it is that a country will be involved in civil war, pervasive social violence will result and conflict and aggression between states become a commonplace recurrence.

The previous Conservative-led government of Canada embarked on a mission to commit $3-billion on aid in a private-public partnership whose goal was to improve maternal, newborn and child health globally. The government of then-Prime Minister Stephen Harper was concerned with the issues of child exploitation, child marriage, forced marriages and most certainly female genital mutilation. Another focus of the goal committed to eradicating those pernicious, soul-destroying customs.

That focus and determined aspirational goal guided the UN to formulate its Sustainable Development Goals. With the reality in mind that an estimated 200 million girls and women have been victimized by genital mutilation common to 30 United Nations member nations all of which dedicate a cultural/religious function of contempt for the rights of women.
UNFPA

When a girl becomes pregnant, her present and future change radically, and rarely for the better. Pregnancy before a girl is physically, developmentally and socially ready jeopardizes her right to a safe, successful transition into adulthood. - See more at: http://www.unfpa.org/publications/girlhood-not-motherhood#sthash.6Dxbkzq4.dpuf

Freeing women from the constraints and restraints of living as inferior creatures subject to the control of men is now understood to be critical in poverty reduction. During his day, then-President George W. Bush spoke of women's equality as a "non-negotiable demand of human dignity". Sweden's Foreign Minister Margot Wallstrom committed her country to the establishment of gender equality driving Swedish foreign policy.

The empowerment of women represents the advancement of all humanity. Global poverty and instability are linked to the economic exclusion of women and their social, cultural, religious inequality common to countries in the Middle East, Africa and Asia. Canada, for one has moved its bilateral development assistance to target gender equality where 80 percent of spending on foreign aid will reflect outlays in the nation's contribution to meet this objective.