Women and gender issues

Following is the text of UN Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed’s video message to the closing session of the Virtual Commonwealth Learning Week today:

The Elsie Initiative, a United Nations Trust Fund that supports deployment of uniformed women to peace operations, announced this morning its first five recipients — Liberia, Mexico, Niger, Senegal and Sierra Leone — during a high-level virtual event.  The Fund also launched its second programming round.

The World Food Programme (WFP) said it will launch an operation to reach up to 2 million vulnerable people in Myanmar’s main cities and other areas where people have recently been uprooted.  WFP estimates that 3.4 million more people will be hungry within the next six months, amid the ongoing effects of poverty, COVID-19 and political crisis.

Following is the text of UN Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohamed’s video message for the high-level dialogue on Increasing Women’s Participation in Electoral Processes and Addressing Violence against Women in Elections, held today:

Following is UN Secretary-General António Guterres’ message for International Girls in ICT Day 2021, observed on 22 April:

Nearly half of women in 57 developing countries are denied the right to decide whether to have sex with their partners, use contraception or seek health care, according to the United Nations Population Fund’s 2021 flagship “State of World Population” report, released today.

Facing pandemic lockdowns, spiking violence and eroded access to services and legal protections, women in war zones continue to suffer and global commitments remain largely unmet, the United Nations senior official on sexual violence in conflict told the Security Council today, calling for a “paradigm shift” in how resources are allocated in the post-COVID-19 world.

Following is the text of UN Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed’s video message at the presentation of the book Aisha Buhari:  Being Different and the Summit on the Emerging Trend on the Role of the First Lady in National Development, today:

Following is UN Secretary-General António Guterres’ remarks at the Generation Equality Forum in Mexico today:

The Commission on the Status of Women concluded its sixty-fifth session today, approving a wide-ranging set of agreed conclusions that broadly reaffirm the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action — adopted at the landmark fourth World Conference on Women in 1995 — as “crucial” to fulfilling the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, as the world slowly emerges from the COVID-19 pandemic.