UN
Women Executive Director Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka and Deputy Executive
Director Yannick Glemarec will join other world leaders at the first World Humanitarian Summit (WHS)
held today and tomorrow in Istanbul, Turkey.
The first gathering of its kind, the Summit aims to place
humanity—people’s safety, dignity and the right to thrive—at the heart
of global decision-making and initiate a set of concrete actions and
commitments to enable countries and communities to better prepare
for and respond to crises. With more than 5,000 expected participants,
the programme will include seven high-level leaders' roundtables on
priority action areas.
At the Summit, UN Women will advocate for greater investment for gender
equality and for women’s rights and women’s empowerment to become
standard principles of humanitarian planning and action. UN Women and
UNFPA Executive Directors will be UN co-chairs for
tomorrow’s Roundtable Four, entitled “High-Level Leaders’ Roundtable on Women and Girls: Catalyzing Action to Achieve Gender Equality”, where Member States, UN and multilateral
actors will come together to endorse core commitments to improve humanitarian action for women and girls
worldwide.
Member State co-chairs for Roundtable four will include: President
Kolinda Grabar-Kitarović (Croatia); President Michael D. Higgins
(Ireland); Deputy Prime Minister Fiame Naomi Mata’afa (Samoa) and Deputy
Prime Minister and Minister for Foreign Affairs Margot
Wallström (Sweden). The Roundtable will be attended by more than 25
Member States and civil society representatives.
Ensuring that humanitarian action works for women and girls is a UN Women priority.
The organization’s core actions for women and girls in humanitarian
situations are to facilitate coordination
and provide leadership, build the capacity of planning and implementing
agencies, ensure response planning is evidence-based and to implement
targeted actions wherever gaps are identified.
“Women have a large stake in the appropriateness of the services they
receive, and must be involved in guiding those provisions to make sure
they are directly relevant and effective. Getting it right for women is
central to finding appropriate solutions for
the millions of families and individuals displaced, homeless, or making
new homes in host countries,” said Ms. Mlambo-Ngcuka.
“There are two important challenges that are still not taken into
consideration or integrated into humanitarian action. Firstly, women are
marginalized when it comes to leadership and meaningful participation
and are consistently excluded from decision-making
processes in humanitarian response.
This results in a lack of support
offered to them to enable them to acquire the skills and resources
needed to rebuild their lives. Secondly, the pervasive rise of sexual
and domestic violence that women and girls experience
in humanitarian situations which remains inadequately addressed” she
added. “We know, for example, that early child marriage—considered a
form of violence—increases dramatically in response to vulnerability and
lack of resources.”
A 2013 assessment estimated
the percentage of Syrian girl refugees in Jordan being married before
age 18 to
have risen from below 17 per cent before the conflict, to more than 50
per cent afterwards.
Without access to sexual and reproductive health
services, these girls have little or no control over pregnancy, with
damaging or deadly consequences. Sixty per cent
of preventable maternal deaths occur among women and girls who have
been displaced or disadvantaged through conflict or natural disaster.
At the Summit, in addition to participation in the official programme,
UN Women will showcase the stories of women leaders and the work on the
ground, from Nepal to Democratic Republic of the Congo to Jordan, in
support of humanitarian action, including through
photo essays, videos and a virtual reality experience at the Exhibition
Fair. See UN Women’s online In Focus package for more.
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