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International Women’s Day 2024: “Invest in women—accelerate progress”
Each year, on March 08, the world marks International Women’s Day (IWD) to renew our collective commitment to achieving gender equality. This year, we are calling for all parties and stakeholders to “invest in women,” to accelerate progress.”
Investing in the sexual reproductive health and wellbeing of women and girls first requires adequate investment in health overall
On this count, MENA Region is lagging. Countries in our Region allocate less than 3% the GDP, against 4% globally. Noting the differences between GCC countries and North African countries, which suffer from prolonged humanitarian context.
Women and girls already perform most of the unpaid work in households—spending two to five times more each day doing such work when compared to men. This highly unequal situation holds women back from fully participating in economic and political life.
Another area where improvement is needed is that our policies do not fully recognize a woman’s autonomy in sexual and reproductive health decisions. They cannot control their bodies, and even they cannot take an independent decision to be pregnant or terminate their pregnancy. Safe abortion rights are still far beyond reach in MENA region where most of the countries deny the women rights to access safe abortion.
Gender inequalities also effect some risk factors of noncommunicable diseases. In Arab states, women have a higher prevalence of being overweight and obese than men, with vulnerability to heart disease and Osteoporosis. Often this is because of less physical activity. This is likely because of gender differences that impact mobility, access to recreational facilities, and perceptions of safety related to crime and traffic on roads.
Women in our Region also face various barriers to access to services, such as constraints of a lack of access to household resources and transport, long distances to health facilities and weak decision-making powers, especially in wars and conflicts
Women in MENA also are absent when it comes to national or regional climate change negations and dialogues, and they are not there when the governments are deciding on the climate change mitigation and adaptation strategies, which influence women at the first place, in a clear climate injustice context.
RAWSA Women Alliance in the MENA region is working relentlessly to put women at the top of the regional and national agendas for development. Our Alliance is providing practical and realistic solutions that include vulnerable groups and grassroot women led civil society, to take part in programmes that address inequity in health, education, and climate change policies. The organization also is working on several projects address GBV and violence against adolescent girls in deprived communities as refugees and internally displaced people camps in Libya, Sudan and other countries.
We at RAWSA believe that equality is a cornerstone to achieve development, and including everyone regardless of their ethnic background or gender orientation is a necessity to ensure that no one is left behind in our pursuit to implement the Global Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), especially the Goal number 5 related to comprehensive gender equality.
Join us in our call to “invest in women – to accelerate the progress”.