Among the natural resources which can be called upon in national plans for development, possibly the most important is human labor. Since the English language suffers from a certain weakness in its ability to describe groups composed of both male and female members, this is usually described as “manpower”. Without a productive labor force, including effective leadership and intelligent middle management, no amount of foreign assistance or of natural wealth can ensure successful development and modernization. The manpower for development during the next quarter-century will come from the world’s present population of infants, children and adolescents. But we are not sure that they will be equal to the task. Will they have the health, the education, the skills, the socio-cultural attitudes essential for the responsibilities of development? For far too many of them the answer is ‘no’. The reason is basic. A child’s most critical years, with regard to physical, intellectual, social and emotional development, are those before he reaches five years of age. During those critical formative years he is cared for almost exclusively by his mother, and in many parts of the world the mother may not have the capacity to raise a superior child. She is incapable of doing so by reason of her own poor health, her ignorance and her lack of status and recognition of social and legal rights, of economic disparity, of independence. One essential factor has been overlooked or ignored. The forgotten factor is the role of women. Development will be handicapped as long as women remain second-class citizens, uneducated, without any voice in family or community decisions, without legal or economic status, married when they are still practically children, and henceforth producing one baby after another, often only to see half of them die before they are of school age.