The SDGs are off-track, and SDG 5 is no exception. For example, 28 per cent of the SDGs’ gender indicators are very far from their 2030 targets. We are only on track to possibly meet one target, which is that of women’s participation in local governments. While we celebrate that, and we should, we need to continue to look at how we can best accelerate all the targets.  

Commonwealth Parliamentarians will benefit from a new partnership that will provide training and development programmes on gender equality. A new agreement between the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association (CPA), with its membership of almost 180 Parliaments and Legislatures across the Commonwealth and the Commonwealth Women Parliamentarians (CWP) network, and UN Women, the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women, aims to ensure that the legal needs of women and girls are better addressed through parliamentary debate and legislation.

On the International Day of United Nations Peacekeepers, we honour the courage of peacekeepers serving under the UN flag and appreciate the importance of their endeavours. We recognize the essential role that female peacekeepers play across UN missions, and their critical contribution to achieving lasting peace. 

Observed every year on 29 May, the International Day of UN Peacekeepers honours all uniformed and civilian individuals who have served and continue to serve in UN peacekeeping operations around the world for their valuable contributions to peace. This year’s celebration also marks the 75th anniversary of UN Peacekeeping. The 2023 theme, “Peace begins with me”, calls on each of us to join the global movement for peace, while recognizing the service and sacrifice of peacekeepers past and present, including the over 4200 peacekeepers who have given their lives under the UN flag. On International Day of UN Peacekeepers, we highlight the voices and celebrate the contributions of women peacekeepers from across Europe and Central Asia.

Theme: Together always: United in diversity

Opening speech by UN Women Executive Director Sima Bahous to the Risk Reduction Hub, a series of meetings held on the margins of the High-Level Meeting on the Midterm Review of the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction, 17 May 2023.

The UN Women Executive Board will convene for its annual session from Monday 19 to Wednesday 21 June 2023 at UN Headquarters in New York.

Around the world, families are on the front lines of the struggle for gender equality —and can be “make or break” for women and girls when it comes to achieving their rights. They can be places of love and support, but too often are spaces where women’s and girls’ rights are violated and their voices stifled.

With the Sustainable Development Agenda deadline only seven years away, there is still much work to be done to achieve SDG5, which calls for gender equality and the empowerment of all women and girls. UN Women research indicates that at the current rate of progress, it will take centuries to reach this goal. However, gender bonds offer a promising solution for direct financing towards projects that reduce gender inequalities and promote women's empowerment. 

Gender equality—and long-term, sustainable economic recovery—cannot be achieved without first closing the gender digital divide.

Women’s economic empowerment is an investment with high returns. It was with this issue in mind that, in 2021, Kazakhstan pledged to open 17 Women’s Entrepreneurship Development Centers (WEDCs) in all provinces and major cities of the country—part of the country’s commitments to UN Women’s Generation Equality initiative through the Action Coalition on Economic Justice and Rights. In partnership with the National Chamber of Entrepreneurs and other international organizations, the Government of Kazakhstan and UN Women launched the WEDCs that same year, giving women across the country the opportunity to start or expand their businesses. 

UN Women Executive Director Sima Bahous carried out a two-day mission in Kenya, where she saw UN Women’s work first-hand, and met with civil society groups and partners, to strengthen partnerships, ignite public discourse towards Generation Equality and galvanize action for gender equality and women’s empowerment in the country.   

Digital skills are at the heart of the future of work.  Demand for those skills will only grow. But access to build those skills and negative stereotypes about girls in STEM are leading to unequal outcomes. Women and girls are 25 per cent less likely than men to have sufficient knowledge and digital skills to use technology. This robs girls of crucial opportunities. While girls do as well as boys in science in most countries, women occupy less than one-third of positions in the technology sector globally.  

UN Women joins our partners in expressing our grave concern over the continued conflict in Sudan.  As in all crises, this will surely have dire and disproportionate impacts on the lives of Sudanese women and girls. We stand in solidarity with the people of Sudan and remain committed to supporting them.

In the face of worsening climate change and environmental degradation, UN Women and partners designed a specialized gender and environment survey to help National Statistics Offices close crucial data gaps on gendered impacts. In Tonga, the survey was rolled out between 31 October and 24 December 2022, reaching 2,541 households with two respondents per household. Remarkable efforts were made to reach respondents from the most marginalized households across the country's many islands. In collaboration with the Tonga Statistics Department, UN Women produced a documentary on the survey's administration, detailing how complex operations were managed to reach all of the country’s ecological areas and sample 99 per cent of the population. 

This Earth Day we’re highlighting the crucial connections between sustainability and gender equality in policy, business, agriculture and beyond.

The Resilient, Inclusive and Sustainable Environments (RISE) grants challenge is a groundbreaking mechanism to address gender-based violence in environmental programming and climate-vulnerable contexts. Hosted by the International Union for the Conversation of Nature (IUCN), the RISE grants challenge represents a commitment made to UN Women’s Generation Equality initiative through the Action Coalition on Feminist Action for Climate Justice. The first of its kind, the challenge invests in and supports partnerships between environmental organizations, community-based organizations and leaders, and organizations with experience addressing gender-based violence.

In Lebanon, where worsening economic conditions have hit women and girls hard, period poverty is on the rise. The Lebanese social enterprise Roof and Roots, with support from ACTED and UN Women as well as funding from the Government of Japan, has been working to address this problem on two fronts, training and employing local women to manufacture and distribute affordable menstrual products. With locations in Jabal Mohsen, Tripoli and Saida, Beirut, the organization also facilitates discussions and educational sessions with women and girls, helping to break taboos around menstruation and reproductive health. By March 2022, the team had produced an initial batch of 13,500 packs of such products, selling them door-to-door and distributing a percentage of revenue to vulnerable women in the area.  

UN Women strongly condemns the Taliban’s latest discriminatory decision to ban Afghan women from working with the United Nations in Afghanistan. We stand in full solidarity with our colleagues, and all women who everyday put their lives at risk to serve their country and we salute their dedication, professionalism, and bravery. We re-assert their inalienable, fundamental human rights as enshrined in the UN Charter. We will not replace our female workforce with men.

At an event that brought together more than 350 representatives from Member States, UN organizations, academia and civil society, the Elsie Initiative Fund (EIF) launched a third call for funding proposals to support the meaningful participation of uniformed women in UN peace operations.