Women and gender issues

Jayathma Wickramanayake, the Secretary-General’s Envoy on Youth, and The Body Shop, launched a campaign today that seeks to get young voices into the halls of power.  The campaign, “Be Seen, Be Heard”, seeks to create long-term structural changes that will make decision-making more inclusive of young people and ensure their participation in political life.

Following are UN Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed’s remarks, as prepared for delivery, at the fifteenth Conference of the Parties (COP15) of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), Gender Caucus high-level event “In pursuit of gender equality for strong land stewardship”, in Abidjan today:

Senegal’s armed forces were approved today to receive funding from the Elsie Initiative Fund to assess barriers to the participation of women in United Nations peace operations.  Senegal is the sixteenth largest troop-contributing country and has 987 personnel deployed as of February 2022, of whom 38, or 3.8 per cent, are women.

With conflicts proliferating and the world’s social fabric increasingly under strain, the use of sexual violence as a tool of power and dominance is also on the rise, experts warned the Security Council today, as delegates from around the world considered the current status of “war’s oldest, most silenced and least-condemned crime”.

The United Nations team in Myanmar remains alarmed by deteriorating humanitarian conditions amid continued fighting, particularly in the country’s south-east and north-west.  Across Myanmar, more than 900,000 people are displaced, including more than 560,000 people who remain uprooted since the military takeover in February 2021.

Increasing reports of sexual violence and human trafficking in Ukraine — allegedly committed against women and children in the context of massive displacement and ongoing fighting — are raising “all the red flags” about a potential protection crisis, the Executive Director of the United Nations gender agency warned the Security Council today.

Following is the text of UN Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed’s video message on the launch of the Zambia Chapter of the African Women Leaders Network, in Lusaka, Zambia, today:

The Commission on the Status of Women approved the first‑ever set of agreed conclusions focused on empowering women and girls in the context of climate action, as it concluded its sixty-sixth session late tonight.

A crisis, whether it is the COVID-19 pandemic or the devastating effects of climate change, can be an opportunity to empower women and advance gender equality by putting women in the centre of the recovery process, speakers told the Commission on the Status of Women during a panel discussion today.

The following statement by UN Secretary-General António Guterres was issued today: