WUNRN
Call to Action!
7 out of 10 hungry people are women and girls
UNIFEM and the Women’s Funding Network urge you to
participate on World Poverty Day 2007, October 17, 2007.
For women, poverty means more
than having little or no income. It means lacking control over their income,
even in the family. It means missing
opportunities because they lack power and voice. It means missing out because they are
undercounted, undervalued, undeserved and underrepresented.
Being deeply affected by
poverty, women also hold great potential to eliminate it. Yet this potential remains largely
untapped. Women remain the missing piece
in solving the poverty puzzle
We invite you to Stand Up Online to call for increased investment in women to eradicate poverty worldwide http://www.womenfightpoverty.org/
Stand
Up!
Last year Stand Up set a Guinness Book record with almost 24 million people participating worldwide; the aim is to set a new world record this year, and I hope that in support of the call by Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon we will actively contribute. Please note that there is a strict 24 hour timeframe to be counted for the record, between 16 October 9 pm GMT - 17 October 9 pm GMT.
During the 24-hour period between
Wednesday,
October 17, 2007 9:00:00 AM
(Tuesday, October 16, 2007 21:00:00 GMT) and
Thursday,
October 18, 2007 9:00:00 AM
(Wednesday, October 17, 2007 21:00:00 GMT) ...
On World Poverty Day, we
join the Stand Up Campaign to call on world leaders to empower the women that
power the global economy — we can’t afford not to. Societies where women are
more equal stand a greater chance of eliminating poverty, starting with
reducing it by half by 2015. At this critical juncture between the promise and
its realization, poverty remains a complex puzzle. We will neither solve it,
nor see the big picture, until all essential pieces are in place.
We
urge world leaders to:
Educate girls and increase
women’s “economic literacy” and political participation;
·
Reform
discriminatory ownership and inheritance laws to help women embark on
asset-building;
·
Remember
that there is no such thing as a “gender-neutral budget” — the impact of every
fiscal policy, be it relating to taxation, or resource allocation, must be
assessed in terms of its impact on the lives of both men and women;
·
Improve
child-care options and flexibility for working mothers;
·
Eliminate
the gender gap in wages;
·
Include
unpaid household work in national income accounts and mandate maternity and
paternity leave benefits;
·
Give
women the “credit” they deserve: facilitate women’s access to credit and
finance, coupled with training, as well as involving them in the development of
macro-economic policy to ensure it is gender-sensitive;
·
Support
women’s funds to support the women for whom every day is poverty day.
For more information or to stand up and be counted visit http://www.womenfightpoverty.org/
~~~~~
UNIFEM is the women's fund
at the United Nations. It provides financial and technical assistance to
innovative programs and strategies to foster women's empowerment and gender
equality. Placing the advancement of women's human rights at the centre of all
of its efforts, UNIFEM focuses its activities on four strategic areas: reducing
feminized poverty; ending violence against women; reversing the spread of
HIV/AIDS among women and girls; and achieving gender equality in democratic
governance in times of peace as well as war.
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