Millennium Development Goals

Goal 3: Promote gender equality and empower women

One of the main reasons preventing girls from attending school in the developing world is the burden of collecting fuel wood and water, and undertaking cooking. In addition, cooking using traditional biomass (dung, firewood, agricultural residues) exposes women and children disproportionately to deadly toxic fumes. An estimated 1.6 million women and children die each year as a result. Providing modern energy can free girls’ and women's time and improve health.

What is Shell doing?

1. Core business activities

Producing and delivering modern energy for development, see Millennium Development Goal 1.

Providing employment and economic empowerment for women, Shell has a long-standing commitment to create a workplace that values equality and diversity. We have a long-term objective to increase the representation of women in senior leadership positions to 20%. By 2006, women in these positions had increased to 11.6%. We are increasing training opportunities tailored to women’s needs – for example our Women’s Career Development programme runs globally in Brazil, China, Nigeria and South Africa. See www.shell.com/careers/equality.

Promoting flexible working: Our Shell General Business Principles require that we provide employees with good and safe working conditions. Our diversity and inclusiveness commitment requires that our companies respect the work-life balance of our staff. Examples of how we are improving gender diversity and inclusiveness, including flexible working, can be found on the web site 'Where women want to work' - opens in new window.

2. Social investment

Tackling indoor air pollution, Breathing Space is the Shell Foundation’s programme to help tackle indoor air pollution from cooking with wood or dung. The programme provides finance to small companies that build and sell cleaner burning cooking stoves and provides loans for poor families to buy them. The initiative aims to have cleaner stoves sold to 20 million poor households worldwide by 2010. See Breathing Space programme - opens in new window.

Supporting women’s groups. For example:

In Nigeria, The Shell Petroleum Development Company of Nigeria Ltd entered its first partnership with women's groups in 1997. In 2000, the programme was dramatically extended with a new emphasis on sustainable development. Today, the company works in partnership with many development agencies and groups.
In Venezuela, with Shell’s assistance, women of the Barranquitas community created the first micro-company to sell fish caught by their husbands.
In South Africa, in partnership with the Free State University, Shell supports rural women of Thabanchu to run household enterprises for chicken and egg-production.
The Shell Group contributed to Dawliffe Hall Educational Foundation with programmes focusing on empowering women in third world countries.

3. Partnerships, policy dialogue and advocacy

Supporting efforts to combat indoor air pollution. The Shell Foundation is active in the Partnership for Clean Indoor Air, see www.pciaonline.org- opens in new window, along with governments, public and private organisations and multilateral institutions, to increase the use of affordable, clean and safe home cooking and heating practices. Shell was the first private organisation to join the Healthy Homes and Communities Partnership initiated by the US Environmental Protection Agency and US government development agencies. See Healthy Homes and Communities Partnership fact sheet - opens in new window.

Supporting international codes: With regard to health, we support the