Importance of Women Empowerment for Development and Peace
The EPD celebrates the International Women's Day on March 8 and thereby the economic, political and social achievements of women in the past, present and future. Particularly, the EPD acknowledges the challenges ahead, in terms of enhancing women's positions in political decision-making and the corresponding potentially positive contributions to developmental and peace processes.
Inés Alberdi, the UNIFEM Executive Director emphasizes that 2010 is a milestone year for women's rights and gender equality, since the 15th anniversary of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action and the 10th anniversary of the Millennium Development Goals show us areas of progress but also call on the global community to put more efforts into changing unbearable situations of women to the better, especially with regard to issues of health access, violence and political participation.
Accordingly,
the theme of this year's International Women's Day is "Equal Rights,
Equal Opportunities: Progress for all". Women and girls around the
world have been able to experience substantial improvements in fields
like education since 1995. Nevertheless, women need to be more
empowered to prevent and recover from discrimination and abuse as well
as to exercise their political and civic rights in order to be able to
push forward agendas of political and social change. Progress in
reducing maternal mortality as stated in goal five of the MDGs lacks
considerably behind. 70 percent of women and girls worldwide become
victims of violence in their lifetime and sexual violence becomes a
weapon in armed conflicts and war. Gender perspectives often find
hardly entrance in policymaking since women are heavily
underrepresented in political institutions. Significantly, the
inclusion of gender perspectives into governance and decentralization processes
would not only be beneficial for the wellbeing of women, but also for
obtaining equitable and inclusive human sustainable development,
according to UN-INSTRAW. Concerning legislative authority, UN-INSTRAW
points to the huge gap between the 15.9 percent worldwide average of
women in parliament and the estimation that at least 30 percent are
needed to talk about a female influence in decision making. Even more
alarming are figures about women holding executive power. Although
there have been increases in the number of women in judicial positions,
they are often denied access to the highest courts. Notably, female
political action is expressed in informal political structures, such as
Non-Governmental Organizations and the social movements which is often
the starting sphere for later female policymakers.
In
his message to the current International Women's Day, the
Secretary-General of the United Nations, Ban Ki-Moon reaffirms the
meaning of the theme "Equal Rights, Equal Opportunities: Progress for
all" by stressing once gain the duality of gender equality and women's
empowerment. Both aims are a matter of human rights and beyond that;
they have "an economic and social imperative" which means that "until
women and girls are liberated from poverty and injustice, all our goals
- peace, security sustainable development - stand in jeopardy."