GENDER EQUALITY AND MILLENNIUM DEVELOPMENT GOALS FOCUS OF INTERNATIONAL WOMEN’S DAY AT HEADQUARTERS, 7 MARCH

Note to Correspondents

GENDER EQUALITY AND MILLENNIUM DEVELOPMENT GOALS FOCUS

OF INTERNATIONAL WOMEN’S DAY AT HEADQUARTERS, 7 MARCH

On Friday, 7 March, the United Nations will observe International Women’s Day (8 March) with a webcast event at Headquarters highlighting the empowerment of women as the key to achieving the Millennium Development Goals.  The event, entitled “Gender Equality and the Millennium Development Goals”, will feature an opening address by Deputy Secretary-General Louise Fréchette.

Speakers at the observance, which will be moderated by Shashi Tharoor, Under-Secretary-General for Communications and Public Information, will include:

-- Geeta Rao Gupta, Co-Chair of the Millennium Development Project Task Force;

-- Emilia Fernandes, Secretary of State for Women’s Rights (Brazil);

-- Nafis Sadik, Special Envoy of the UN Secretary-General for HIV/AIDS in Asia;

-- Sergio Vieira de Mello, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.

In September 2000, 147 heads of State and government agreed, at the United Nations Millennium Summit, to a groundbreaking set of time-bound and measurable goals and targets.  The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), as they are known, aim to combat poverty, hunger, disease, illiteracy, environmental degradation and discrimination against women.  The Summit’s Millennium Declaration also outlined a wide range of commitments in human rights, good governance and democracy.

Of the eight Millennium Development Goals, Goal 3 calls for empowering women and promoting gender equality, specifically setting targets to eliminate gender disparity at all levels of education by 2015, with additional indicators on women’s employment and the proportion of women in parliaments.  This year’s International Women’s Day will be an occasion to emphasize that gender equality is an essential cross-cutting component for meeting all the targets.  Panellists will focus specifically on health issues, poverty and human rights, particularly the right to education, as they relate to women and the MDGs.

The United Nations observance, organized by the Special Adviser on Gender Issues and Advancement of Women, the Division for the Advancement of Women/Department of Economic and Social Affairs and the Department of Public Information (DPI), in collaboration with the United Nations Inter-Agency Network

on Women and Gender Equality, will begin at 10:00 a.m. in Conference Room 2.  Each year, International Women’s Day is officially observed in countries around the world on 8 March.

Members of delegations, media, accredited non-governmental organization representatives and Secretariat staff are invited to attend the event.  A live and on-demand webcast of the event can be accessed at www.un.org/events/iwday2003/.

For more information on the event, “Gender Equality and the Millennium Development Goals”, contact Paul Hoeffel, tel.:  (212) 963-8070,

fax:  (212) 963-6914, e-mail:  hoeffel@un.org.  For United Nations television coverage, please call tel.:  (212) 963-7650, or fax:  (212) 963-3860.  For media accreditation, please call tel.:  (212) 963-6934, or fax: (212) 963-4642.

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