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| Saturday, 26 February 2005 |
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Government Ministers and other representatives from more than a hundred countries will meet from February 28 to March 11 at the UN headquarters in New York to confront major obstacles to the advancement of women, a press release from United Nations Information Centre said. The meeting named as the 10-Year Review and Appraisal is part of the 49th session of the Commission on the Status of Women and is a follow-up to the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995. Participating governments are expected to re-affirm their commitment to gender equality and the Advancement of Women. A launching point for discussion will be a comprehensive report of the Secretary General assessing progress towards meeting the commitments made in Beijing and at a 5-year review held as a special session of the General Assembly in 2000. The report is drawn from a survey in which 135 countries submitted information on what they have accomplished in promoting gender equality and the challenges they still face in following through on the commitments outlined in the Beijing Platform for Action. The Beijing Conference governments have established a variety of institutional mechanisms to advance gender equality but financial and technical constraints as well as a lack of data often hamper the efforts of these bodies. In all regions, improvements have been registered in education, poverty reduction, women's health and the participation and representation of women in public life. Greater efforts are, however needed to increase women's involvement in decision-making, the release said. Worldwide economic trends such as globalisation, trade liberalisation, migration and privatisation as well as the wider diffusion of information and communications technology have had impacts on women, both positive and negative. On the positive side, access to information and communications technology has increased women's networking and economic opportunities. On the negative side, in some contexts they have increased poverty, particularly in rural areas where the shift from food production to cash crop production has affected the lives of women farmers and put household food security at risk. It added that the two week session will consist of a high-level plenary meeting open to all UN Member States and Observers followed by a roundtable dialogue among high-level representatives from governments. A series of seven interactive panels will examine policy issues in more detail including on the challenges to effective implementation of CEDAW and the Beijing Platform for Action, linking the Platform for Action and the Millennium Development Goals, the gender dimensions of macro-economics and how young women and men perceive gender roles and gender equality. |
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