APARAJITASantiago, 28th February, witnessed the meeting of women leaders from all over the world to deliberate the progress made on the Beijing Platform of Action. The 12 main objectives of this Platform of Action included Women and Poverty, Education and Training of Women, Women and Health, Violence against Women, Women and Armed Conflict, Women and the Economy, Women in Power and Decision-making, Institutional Mechanism for the Advancement of Women, Human Rights of Women, Women and the Media, Women and the Environment and the Girl-child.

It was observed that in the 20 years since the initiation of the Platform of Action in Beijing, the journey on the road to gender equality has been incredibly slow and uneven and that if this pace continues then it would be another century before we see substantial changes in the current equation of gender inequality. On the occasion of this high level event Women and power and decision making- Building a different world, the UN Women Executive director, Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, quoted For womens leadership to thrive, and for change to happen, all of us need greater courage and decisiveness. Among the leaders who signed the Call to Action were the UN Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon as well as the President of Chile Michelle Bachelet.

While there have been many initiatives taken up in different countries towards the fulfilment of this cause and several of them have indeed benefitted from them as well, there is still a lot remaining to do in this area. An example of such an initiative is the Indira Kranthi Patham, taken up by the Government of India, which is a micro-finance oriented project for poor women, which is implemented in Andhra Pradesh at the community-level. It creates local institutions that provide savings and credit facilities to, and are also run by, poor women. Its core activities include (a) forming self-help institutions to provide poor women with credit, (b) assist in diversifying the livelihoods of women, and (c) supporting these women in influencing the markets in their locality by helping them develop entrepreneurial and leadership skills. The main goal of Indira Kranthi Patham is to reduce poverty amongst women.

Questions:

1) Choose any one of the 12 objectives of the Beijing Platform of Action and provide your own suggestions and solutions with regards to how a difference can be made in the lives of women.

2) With more and more women joining the workforce gender equality is now perhaps more in focus than ever before. What do you suggest should be the steps taken to remove theinequality between genders.

3) Choose any one woman leader and track her success story to indicate the difficulties she faced as well as how she overcame them. (Max word limit for question (3) 1 page)