This year is also significant as it will see the launch of UN Women, a higher status and better-resourced UN entity to tackle gender equality issues globally, at a time when the gender-related challenges in achieving the Millennium Development Goals by 2015 appear especially daunting. While there have been significant achievements in terms of girls’ access to education, maternal mortality rates, especially among teenage girls, remain frighteningly high in much of sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. Political commitments backed by adequate and sustainable funding flows are urgently needed but especially difficult to secure in the current post-3F global crisis environment.

Nevertheless change is happening around the globe, in many cases spearheaded by initially small-scale civil society initiatives, capitalising on deep context-specific knowledge and the creativity of local women, girls and their communities. It is precisely this type of innovation that the ODI Exploring and Expanding the Frontiers of Gender and Development seminar series has sought to highlight. Our final public event in the series represents the culmination of this undertaking and will provide an opportunity to hear from cutting-edge scholars, programme advisors and practitioners exploring a range of new initiatives aimed at expanding the frontiers of gender and development interventions. While there is a wealth of information on the underlying causes of gender inequalities in development, our collective knowledge base on promising practices to address these inequalities remains fragmented, under-researched and under-documented. This event will therefore aim to identify new frontiers in important areas of gender and development including gender-based violence, climate change, economic and social empowerment, and governance, with the possibility for highlighting promising new initiatives and the potential to go to scale.