UN director advocates women’s empowerment, rights pledges

Ms Lakshmi Puri, the Deputy Executive Director, UN Entity for Gender Equality and Empowerment of Women (UN Women), has called on member states to implement pledges on women’s empowerment and rights in order to boost the unique potential of women.

Puri, spoke at a multi-stakeholders’ consultative forum, ahead of the meeting of the Commission on Status of Women, a body exclusively dedicated to promotion of gender equality and women’s empowerment.

She called for sustained commitment and leadership to ensure a successful outcome of the Commission’s meeting , according to a statement.

The forum was organised to contribute to the preparations for the 61st Session of the Commission on the Status of Women- a functional commission of the UN Economic and Social Council, scheduled to meet in March.

“We are at an important juncture in the achievement of gender equality and women’s empowerment and women’s human rights,” she said.

She recalled adoption of far-reaching global commitments, such as Beijing+20 (the 20-year review of the implementation of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action), the Sustainable Development Goals, the Paris Agreement on Climate Change, among others.

“Now it is about the normative of implementation – how do we implement different parts of the compact and how do we follow up and monitor the implementation,” she said.

She said the forum sought to raise awareness on existing commitments as well as to identify key areas and issues that should be considered by the Commission and to strengthen dialogue.

The theme of the upcoming session is, “Women’s Economic Empowerment in the Changing World of Work.’’

Puri expressed the hope that the session would provide concrete, practical and action-oriented recommendations that would cover significant new grounds on overcoming structural barriers to gender issues.

“There is a dynamic new element of assessing how the world of work is changing due to technology, migration, and other factors and whether women can be enabled to leapfrog beneficially into this new context and not adversely affected and left behind,” she said.