Women experience the brunt of the world's poverty, with serious implications for their health and livelihoods. They also suffer disproportionately during crises - whether earthquakes, floods, wars or famines.

Spiralling violence against women in war zones has prompted one peacekeeper to comment that it's "now more dangerous to be a woman than a soldier in modern conflicts".

Rape has always been used as a weapon of war, but the type of brutality inflicted on women in some humanitarian hotspots today is unprecedented, many experts say.

The brutality accompanying rape in Democratic Republic of Congo is a frequently cited example, but sexual violence is increasingly being used as a weapon in conflicts around the world. In Rwanda, up to 500,000 women were raped during the 1994 genocide. In Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, an estimated 60,000 women were raped during the 1990s conflict there.

U.N. crisis expert Kathleen Cravero believes one reason why brutality against women during and after conflicts has got so much worse is because the nature of war has changed. Most conflicts today are not between countries; they are within countries. To some extent, armies observe rules of conduct that militias and rebel groups do not – although, of course, soldiers also rape.

Another changing aspect of conflict is that fighting now kills more civilians than combatants. According to the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), 90 percent of fatalities in conflicts since 1990 have been civilians - many of them women and children.

Rape is an effective weapon because it forces populations to flee and breaks down communities. Fear of attack prevents women from working in fields and fetching water and firewood, and it stops children going to school. And, as Amnesty International says, rape is cheaper than bullets.

For girls and women, the psychological, physical and social effects can last a lifetime. It is one crime where communities often stigmatise the victim, rather than the perpetrator. Wives may be rejected by their husbands and girls rendered unmarriageable. Some victims are as young as six.

But reporting rape is often seen as pointless and may make things worse. In Congo, just 2 percent of perpetrators are called to account, according to UNDP. And there are reports that many simply bribe their way out.

Cravero is director of UNDP's Bureau for Crisis Prevention and Recovery which has launched a special strategy to address the needs of women affected by conflicts and natural disasters (see next section).

The aims include protecting women from violence, ensuring they have access to justice, strengthening women's representation, promoting equality and urging governments to work for women. The campaign also includes ensuring women participate in politics and have access to business, credit and land.

Out of 12 peace agreements reached between 1991 and 2001 that put an end to conflicts only four - El Salvador, Liberia, Sierra Leone and East Timor - included a provision directly related to women, according to UNDP.

But empowering women is not just a question of fairness. It can also speed up recovery. "Women tend to be very positive agents for reconciliation and peace," says Cravero, pointing out that women from different sides of a conflict often identify with one another in a way that men don't.

For more on the dangers faced by women forced to flee their homes during conflicts, see AlertNet's briefing on refugees.

Natural disasters often kill many more women than men. For example, three times as many women died in the Pakistan earthquake as men. Why? Because women were more likely to be indoors and died when their homes collapsed on top of them.

After the Indian Ocean tsunami many regions found the death toll among women was three or four times higher than men. Women and girls were less likely to know how to swim, and their garments may have hindered them from running or clambering onto roofs or up trees.

Droughts can place an extra burden on women, who are often responsible for providing water and food for their families. Women's livelihoods may also be more vulnerable in disasters. For example, in some Caribbean countries women depend entirely on a single crop. When a hurricane strikes their income is wiped out until they can sow and harvest again.

"Men are more able to stick a hammer in their back pocket and get one of the construction jobs for rebuilding," says U.N. crisis expert Cravero.

And when push comes to shove, women are responsible for their children. If they can't put food on the table they may end up selling sex, which in turn increases their vulnerability to HIV/AIDS.

Women are also at increased risk of sexual and physical violence after natural disasters. This is partly because social mores collapse with the destruction of traditional communities and partly because of the high levels of frustration in camps for displaced people. With no means to support their family, men may take their anger out on women.

Domestic and sexual violence are both reported to have increased in the aftermath of the tsunami. Examples from Sri Lanka include women who were battered because they resisted their husbands selling their jewellery, or disputed their use of tsunami relief funds, or were blamed for the deaths of their children.

Some 70 percent of the world's poor are women, according to the U.N. Millennium Campaign. The majority of the 1.5 billion people living on $1 a day or less are women. And worldwide, women only earn just over half what men earn.

In addition, the gap between women and men trapped in poverty has continued to widen in the past decade, a phenomenon sometimes called the feminisation of poverty.

Women are often denied access to resources such as credit, land and inheritance. Their lack of education also limits their ability to better their situation - more than 40 million girls miss out on a primary education and two thirds of illiterate young people are women, according to aid agency ActionAid.

And with few positions of power, women have little chance of rectifying these inequalities.

In 2000, governments committed to a set of poverty reduction goals, including halving poverty and hunger, providing every child with primary education and cutting maternal mortality, by the year 2015.

ActionAid argues that systematic discrimination against girls and women in poor countries will prevent the United Nations meeting these goals. In its report Hit or miss? Women's rights and the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), the agency says empowering women and girls is not just a question of justice but is the most effective route to achieving the MDG targets.

Land and labour

One major factor contributing to women's poverty is land. Women own just 1 percent of land in the world, according to UNDP. In many places women can only access land via men - husbands, brothers etc - which means they are dependent on these relationships for their survival. Lack of rights to land also affects women's access to food. Female-headed households are more likely to suffer chronic hunger than other groups.

A global conference on women in Beijing in 1995 called on countries to undertake legislative and administrative reforms to give women equal access to economic resources, including the right to inheritance and to own land. However, progress has been slow. Only a few countries have changed their laws to make it possible for women to inherit land.

Aid agencies say protecting women's land rights in parts of Africa ravaged by AIDS is crucial to prevent rural households slipping further into poverty. If a woman loses property or land when her husband dies it may limit her ability to feed her family and force her children out of school and into work.

Not only do women earn far less than men, but often their labour goes completely unrewarded. For example, women and girls in Africa spend some 40 billion hours collecting water each year, according to ActionAid.

Microfinancing

With no property or other collateral, women in developing countries find it difficult to secure loans to build small businesses and improve their lot.

Providing credit, especially microcredit, has proved a successful strategy for lifting women out of poverty.

The most famous example is Bangladesh's Grameen Bank, which won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006. Economist Muhammad Yunus set up the bank in 1976 to lend to the neediest, enabling them to start small businesses without collateral. In doing so, he pioneered microcredit, a system now copied around the world.

The Grameen has helped millions of families break out of poverty. Today 96 percent of its 6.4 million borrowers are women - a complete reversal of conventional banking which focuses on men.

"We saw that money that went to women brought so much more benefit to the family than the same amount going to the family through the man," Yunus says.

Analysts say households where women have borrowed from institutions such as the Grameen have been shown to invest more in education, nutrition, and shelter, with broad knock-on effects.

Poverty, war and disasters all put a greater strain on women's health.

Every minute a woman dies of complications due to childbirth. This adds up to more than half a million women annually. And 99 percent of those deaths happen in the developing world. Yet most are easily preventable.

In rural India, one woman dies every five minutes giving birth. In Niger, the risk of a woman dying from pregnancy-related causes during her lifetime is about one in seven compared with one in 17,400 in Sweden.

And every year, more than 1 million children lose their mothers because of maternal death, which has repercussions for their health and safety.

Improving maternal health is one of the eight Millennium Development Goals. Targets include reducing maternal mortality by three quarters between 1990 and 2015 and achieving universal access to reproductive health.

Sadly, it is the area of least progress among all the MDGs. Official development assistance for reproductive health, including maternal, newborn and child health, increased from $2.1 billion in 2003 to $3.5 billion in 2006, but experts say this is not enough to meet targets. They estimate that between $5.5 billion and $6.1 billion in additional funding is needed annually.

For every woman who dies during pregnancy, many others suffer serious injuries in childbirth, which can blight their lives permanently. One of the most distressing is fistula, which is caused by obstructed labour. The baby usually dies, and the woman is left with chronic incontinence. Because of her inability to control her urine or faeces, she is often abandoned by her husband and family and ostracised by her community. Without work or family, she may be forced to rely on charity.

Another condition is uterine prolapse where the womb falls out of the body. It can be caused by multiple births in quick succession. It is not only painful and embarrassing, but can be fatal in some cases. In Nepal, the condition afflicts nearly one in three women in rural areas, according to aid agency IRC.

Aside from pregnancy related complications, women in developing countries are increasingly at risk of HIV/AIDS. African women account for 75 percent of all young people living with HIV/AIDS, according to ActionAid. And young women aged 15-24 are being infected three times faster than their male peers. The World Health Organisation explains here some of the reasons behind what has been called the feminisation of AIDS.