International Women’s Day, 2023: Gender-Responsive Approach to Technology and Innovation Will Ensure Progress

Promoting gender equality in technology and digital spaces is at the core of the UN’s observance of International Women’s Day (IWD) as UN senior officials call on the world to take concrete action against ingrained gender biases.

Breaking Barriers: Why Free & Public Education Should be Every Woman’s Right

This month, government and civil society organization representatives gathered in New York for the United Nations’ 67th session of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) to discuss technology as a tool to facilitate access to education for women and girls.

Breaking the Link between ‘Polycrisis’ and Poverty

This year marks the halfway point— eight years in and eight years out— of the UN Sustainable Development Goals to end poverty and reduce inequalities.

A Caribbean Writer Fights Gender-Based Violence with Lit, Protests

For the past six years, Jamaican writer and scholar Opal Palmer Adisa has been one of the voices crying out against the prevalence of gender-based violence in the Caribbean and elsewhere. To highlight this human rights issue, she launched “Thursdays in Black” - holding public protests throughout the year and, on Thursdays, making use of social media to spread her message and raise awareness.

International Women’s Day, 2023
World Parliaments Could Take Another 80 Years to Achieve Gender Parity Among Legislators

For the first time in history, says a new report from the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU), not a single functioning parliament in the world is “male-only”. Is the increasing number of women in parliaments a singular achievement for gender empowerment? Or is it the result of mandatory legislative quotas for women’s representation in world’s parliaments?

International Women’s Day, 2023
Women and Girls: Innovation and Higher Education

In September 2020, the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action for women’s rights celebrated its 25th anniversary. It was, however, a bittersweet commemoration, mixing joy for the progress in gender equality achieved since 1995, and the stark realization about the multidimensional gaps awaiting tackling and the new divides brought by the social consequences of COVID-19.

International Women’s Day, 2023
The Power of Technology—& the Increased Exclusion, Inequalities & Gender Discrimination

Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the tremendous power of technology and innovation has become clear to the world. However, it has also increased exclusion, discrimination, and inequalities -- especially for women and girls.

International Women’s Day, 2023
Empower Her

On International Women’s Day, let us remind ourselves of the power of education. We have all benefited from an education that less than a century ago was not a given for a girl and which still remains a distant utopia for millions of young girls.

Why Do 800 Mothers a Day – 1 Every 2 Minutes– Die from Preventable Causes?

The answer is that there are alarming setbacks for maternal health care and, in many cases, even a total lack of maternity services, which threaten to further raise the number of these tragic preventable deaths one million or more a year by 2030.

International Women’s Day, 2023
Five Sharp Questions on Female Empowerment

International Women's Day is right around the corner and it presents an obvious opportunity to dig into what female and empowerment means for different people.

International Women’s Day, 2023
Promoting Gender Equality and Closing the Digital Divide

The accelerating pace of digitalization has ushered humanity into a whole different era of information and communication. Today, digitalization permeates every aspect of our lives, socio-economically and politically.

International Women’s Day, 2023
Her Land, Her Rights: Advancing Gender Equality & Land Restoration Goals

When it comes to land, gender inequalities are pervasive. Today, nearly half of the global agricultural workforce is female – yet less than one in five landholders worldwide are women ¹.  

International Women’s Day, 2023
To Strengthen Women’s Resilience to Disasters, Make Wealthiest Pay Their Fair Share

She will be called Aya. This is the name that nurses gave to the infant baby pulled from the rubble of a five-story building in Jinderis, northern Syria. A miracle. Beside her, the rescuers found her mother, dead.

International Women’s Day, 2023
A New Global Architecture to Defend & Promote Rights of Women & Girls

If you want to have a good reading on women and young girls’ activism, there is a high chance that you have missed an incredibly interesting report.

Interwoven Global Crises Can Best be Solved Together

When global crises are interlinked, they overlap and compound each other. In such cases, the most effective solutions are those that work at the nexus of all these challenges.

A Geoeconomic Tsunami

When tectonic plates shift, the earth shakes. Tsunamis race around the globe in the form of shock waves. The global economy has experienced three such earthquakes in recent years. The Covid-19 pandemic has made us aware of the vulnerability of a globally integrated economy.

Wildlife Is Much More than a Safari. And It Is at Highest Risk of Extinction

Wildlife is indeed far much more than a safari or an ‘exotic’ ornament: as many as four billion people –or an entire half the whole world's population– rely on wild species for income, food, medicines and wood fuel for cooking.

Earthquake Relief Efforts in Syria Shouldn’t Overlook Those With Disabilities

A few days ago, I saw a photo shared to Twitter of Sham, a young Syrian girl rescued from under the rubble in northwest Syria, sitting upright in her hospital bed, According to the Syrian Civil Defense, a volunteer humanitarian group also known as the White Helmets, Sham will lose both her legs because of injuries from the quake.

The Case For Criminalizing Ecocide

Genocide, war crimes, aggression, ecocide, crimes against humanity – which is the odd one out? The right answer is ecocide - destroying, polluting or damaging the natural living world on a large scale is not among the crimes that can be prosecuted at the International Criminal Court in The Hague.

One of the World’s Largest Oil Corporations to Lead Climate Change Talks in 2023

The Chief Executive of the twelfth largest oil producer - Sultan Al Jaber of Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC) - has been appointed as president of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change’s (UNFCCC) COP28, the biggest climate change conference that will take place in November, 2023 in the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

Beyond Zero Discrimination: A New Social Contract for Health and Care Workers

While its origins may be rooted in the discrimination faced by people living with HIV, Zero Discrimination Day has evolved to celebrate commitments to the fundamental human right of being treated equally in law and in practice.