The promotion of gender equality and women’s empowerment is essential to UNDP’s development approach. The UNDP Strategic Plan (2014-2017) reinforces that, ‘sustainable human development will not be fully achieved unless women and girls are able to contribute on an equal basis with men and boys to their societies’. For this reason, the Plan pursues engagement principles that ensure participation and voice for women - and other groups that face the greatest exclusion and inequalities - as agents of their own development.