The proposed sustainable development goals (SDGs), which will replace the millennium development goals (MDGs), feature a standalone goal on gender, which encourages the world to "achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls".
The leaders of Britain, Indonesia and Liberia are due to recommend to the UN a list of post-2015 MDGs.
It was the first of a litany of worthy aims enshrined in the United Nations "millennium development goals" (MDGs).
The adoption of the MDGs was relatively straightforward in comparison, shepherded through by some UN officials who focused on things that could make a big difference and had a reasonable chance of being implemented.
Proposals will be made for new ways to hold to account the rich countries that will have to pay a significant part of the price of achieving the new goals.The debate about how effective the MDGs have been will intensify as the announcement of the new goals gets nearer.
The MDGs themselves do not always deserve the credit: the plunge in the global poverty rate has far more to do with growth in China than anything agreed on at the UN.
Academics and scientists have analysed every goal and target, and debated the cost-effectiveness of achieving them.Not surprisingly, the agenda that has emerged is broader than the MDGs.
A group of rich governments, including America and Britain, plus some business leaders and philanthropists such as Bill Gates, would prefer a smaller set of crunchier goals, with an emphasis on building on and completing the work of the MDGs.
The problem will only worsen, says Morten Jerven of Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, when the MDGs are replaced by new, more detailed development targets in 2016.
Myanmar's progress towards a host of the UN's Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) looks correspondingly better though in plenty of other cases, it looks worse.
Several of the eight MDGs have been achieved by this year's deadline, including halving the proportion of people living in extreme poverty.
