Ambar SyedWith March being a month that celebrates female empowerment, specifically March 8th being International Women’s Day 2020, the world is aiming to make strides towards achieving gender equality.
The theme set for this year’s IWD is ‘I Am Generation Equality: Realizing Women’s Rights,’ which is aligned with the UN Women’s Generation Equality campaign.
Ever since the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action of 1995, there has been a significant movement towards ensuring the rights of women and girls being met across the globe.
At the time, 189 governments endorsed this Declaration, committing to take strategic actions regarding critical areas of concern when it came to human rights.
Some of these areas included poverty, education and training, health, violence, armed conflict, economy, power, and media.
To mark the 25th anniversary of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, this year’s IWD theme draws attention to demanding equal pay, equal sharing of domestic work, a clear end to sexual harassment and violence, access to necessary health care services and equal participation within politics.
The United Nations Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres, is encouraging everyone to join the #GenerationEquality movement.
“In the next two years, I will do everything in my power to make sure women are represented in all decisions at the UN,” he said.
“There is strong pushback against women’s rights: discriminatory economic & immigration policies, limited access to sexual & reproductive rights, roll back of laws that protected women from violence. We must push back against the pushback and refuse to lose ground we have won,” he tweeted on March 6, 2020 (@antonioguterres).
The campaign and #GenerationEquality movement aims to bring together people of every age, gender, ethnicity, race, religion, and nationality, to work alongside each other and drive change to ensure a gender-equal world.
