A/RES/72/148 Improvement of the situation of women and girls in rural areas (q) Promoting the rights of women and girls with disabilities in rural areas, including by ensuring access on an equal basis to productive employment and decent work, economic and financial resources and disability-sensitive infrastructure and services, in particular in relation to health and education, as well as by ensuring that their priorities and needs are fully incorporated into policies and programme s, through, inter alia, their participation in decision-making processes; (r) Developing specific assistance programmes and advisory services to promote economic skills of rural women in banking, modern trading and financial procedures, including fiscal literacy, and providing microcredit and other financial and business services to a greater number of women in rural areas, in particular female heads of households, for their economic empowerment; (s) Supporting women entrepreneurs and women smallholder farmers, including those in subsistence farming, by continuing to provide public investment and to encourage private investment in rural women to close the gender gap in agriculture, and facilitating their access to extension and financial services, agricultural inputs and land, water, sanitation and irrigation, markets and innovative technologies; (t) Mobilizing resources, including at the national level and through official development assistance, for increasing women’s access to existing savings and credit schemes, as well as targeted programmes that provide women with capital, knowledge and tools that enhance their economic capacities; (u) Seeking to ensure and improve equal access for rural women to decent work in agricultural and non-agricultural sectors, supporting and promoting opportunities in small and medium-sized enterprises, sustainable social enterprises and cooperatives and improving working conditions; (v) Investing in infrastructure and in time- and labour-saving technologies, including sustainable energy, safe drinking water and sanitation and information and communications technologies, especially in rural areas, benefiting women and girls by reducing their burden of domestic activities, affording the opportunity for girls to attend school and for women to engage in self-employment or to participate in the labour market; (w) Taking appropriate measures to raise public awareness among rural women and girls about the risks of trafficking in persons, including the factors that make rural women and girls vulnerable to trafficking, and discouraging, with a view to eliminating, the demand that fosters all forms of exploitation, including sexual exploitation and forced labour, with a view to eliminating the exploitation of rural women and girls; (x) Supporting remunerative non-agricultural employment for rural women, including in the informal sector, including measures to improve working conditions, increase access to productive resources, invest in relevant infrastructure, public services and time- and labour-saving technologies, promote rural women’s paid employment in the formal economy and address the structural and underlying causes of the difficult conditions faced by rural women; (y) Taking steps to build the capacities and skills of rural women and their enterprises and cooperatives and to design or develop and implement procurement policies and measures to enable rural women and their enterprises and cooperatives to benefit from public and private sector procurement processes, recognizing that the promotion of rural women’s enterprises and cooperatives can sustainably contribute to the economic empowerment of rural women; 6/9 17-22936