Travelling in northern Nigeria, Peace Umanah noticed teenage girls with multiple children – they would be walking with one strapped to their back, holding another by hand and with a protruding belly.
For decades now, world leaders have talked about ending hunger and poverty and building a new world order based on human rights and gender-equality.
The increased empowerment of rural women in Bangladesh over the past 10 years has been no accident.
A decade ago, not even
one in four rural women could be said to be “empowered” across five key metrics, a figure that surprised even those working on the ground with the country’s poorest. By 2015, this had risen to more than two in five, or 41 per cent, with continued gains in recent years.
It was on a visit to Lesotho that I first heard the derogatory term
Mmutla – nocturnal hare. It is a word used in some southern districts to insult adolescent girls who have been forced into sexual exploitation and transactional sexual relations for survival.
When I was a young girl, a friend and I spent our summers building a treehouse. We built it because our older brothers were building one and wouldn’t allow us to help them. So, we asked our parents to support us through the procurement of basic tools, collected scrap wood from the local hardware store, chose a tree, and then spent day after day puzzling beams and boards together into structure in which only people of our small size could fit.
Women around the world play crucial roles in education as formal educators, school staff members, and parents of students. But women are also transforming education as non-formal educators in ways that can be scaled to improve education broadly. As we celebrate International Women’s Day (March 8), it’s important that this transformative role is recognized.
One of our greatest challenges is advancing gender equality in the face of the climate crisis.
They constitute the majority of the world’s poor.
WAR
The world is currently facing a devastating war with dire prospects for our global security. Men are waging this war while women seek peace and security for their families, communities and our global society. Women are give birth and nurture while some men actively seek death and destruction. This is one of the fundamental differences between the sexes which underpins patriarchy and generates inequality on many levels. Women and girls bear the brunt of this unbalanced approach to life.
Access to clean energy improves women’s lives in a myriad of ways. It supports access to education and quality healthcare, opens new economic opportunities, and reduces unpaid domestic labour and gender-based violence. Yet too often, the sector as a whole – from industry to policymaking – still fails to include women as energy users, decision-makers and agents of change of the energy transition.
UN Women estimates
150 million women and girls are emerging from poverty by 2030, thanks largely to comprehensive education, labor, and social protection strategies and reforms implemented by governments around the world.
Again we commemorate International Women’s Day – it is March, 8. We want to celebrate women’s achievements and raise awareness for their successes, taking action for equality. Today I would like to draw your attention to women in science and in particular to one outstanding scientist.
When countries improve their Global ranking, there is rejoicing within the community that progress has been made at last.. but has it and why does it matter ?
At Equality Now, we have been on a years-long journey to track and analyze sexual violence laws and their implementation around the world. This work was born after working with survivors of sexual violence for over two decades and observing that women and girls reported similar barriers to justice regardless of where they were from.
This will be the second International Women’s Day since the brutal coup erupted in Myanmar – and women remain fiercely in the lead in demanding justice and peace in the streets and behind closed doors.
The devastating effects of climate change continue to disproportionately affect women and girls in the poorest regions, who have contributed the least to global warming.
Manjo Sheik, a 25-year-old entrepreneur from India, says women have multiple obstacles to overcome.
Parliamentarians' leadership in a post-COVID-19 recovery is crucial to achieving the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) agenda. The involvement of lawmakers in ensuring a more equal, just, and sustainable society will come under the spotlight during a two-day inter-regional meeting organized by the Asian Population and Development Association (APDA) and the Forum of Arab Parliamentarians on Population and Development (FAPPD,) and supported by UNFPA ASRO in early March 2022.
“Persons with disabilities are capable and equal. It is time the world understands that,” says Antonio Palma, a UN Volunteer at the Resident Coordinator’s Office in Guatemala. Antonio, who has a visual impairment, expresses what many other persons with disabilities feel. Ignored, mistreated, misunderstood, underestimated, condescended to.
As the world observes the International Day of Persons with Disabilities today, we honour the leadership of persons with disabilities and their tireless efforts to build a more inclusive, accessible and sustainable world. At the same time, we resolve to work harder to ensure a society that is open and accommodating of all.
Since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, the increase in domestic violence rates has led the
United Nations to declare a ‘shadow pandemic’ of gender-based violence. In the most brutal cases, the violence has led to murder – or ‘femicide’, as the
World Health Organisation calls the killing of women
specifically because of their gender.
The COVID-19 pandemic has had devastating effects across the globe, but the data and evidence show that women have borne the brunt of the crisis. While inequalities in health, economic power, and other areas existed long before the pandemic began, the pandemic has widened these gaps.