A4ID’s Chief Executive Yasmin Batliwala, to give keynote speech at the UN’s 62nd Commission on the Status of Women

Yasmin Batliwala, will give a keynote speech at the UN’s 62nd Commission on the Status of Women later in the month.

The Commission on the Status of Women is the key intergovernmental body devoted to women’s empowerment and gender equality.

The Commission’s annual sessions at UN headquarters in New York brings together UN Member States, civil society organizations and UN entities to discuss and deliberate on how to realize women’s empowerment and gender equality globally, through the 1995 Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action and the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

This year’s theme focuses on the challenges and opportunities in realizing gender equality and empowerment for women in rural areas. The idea behind this theme is to identify the legal barriers to credit and financial access, property ownership, inheritance and natural resource rights.

Yasmin will be joined by Dr. Irene Khan, Director-General at International Development Law Organization and Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, United Nations Under-Secretary-General and Executive Director of UN Women to explore the successes of previous legal pathways to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals.

Yasmin is expected to speak on some of the work A4ID has been involved in to realise the empowerment of women in rural areas through legal means and how A4ID’s work is setting out to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals particularly, SDG 5 (gender equality) and SDG 10 (reduced inequality).