Women hold key to eradicating poverty, UN officials tell commission

Women hold key to eradicating poverty, UN officials tell commission

1 March 2004 – Women hold the key to eradicating poverty worldwide, but must 
be supported in their efforts to lead families, societies and nations towards 
prosperity, senior United Nations officials told an intergovernmental meeting 
in New York today. 

Addressing the Commission on the Status of Women, José Antonio Ocampo, the 
Under-Secretary-General for Economic and Social Affairs, stressed the need to 
ensure gender equality in order to reach the Millennium Development Goals 
(MDGs) set by a UN summit in 2000 to tackle global ills.  
http://www.un.org/womenwatch/daw/csw/

“In order to reduce extreme poverty, enhance social integration and achieve 
gender equality, we must be able to reconcile economic growth, employment 
generation and social and gender equality policies,” he said. 

He noted that men must play an active role in this endeavour. “It is 
important to identify the positive efforts already made by men and boys in 
many contexts and to find ways to encourage and support other men to 
understand the value of gender equality and to become active in its 
promotion,” he said. 

Assistant Secretary General Angela E.V. King, the Special Adviser on Gender 
Issues and Advancement of Women, cautioned that despite growing awareness of 
the need for gender equality, in many countries women’s rights are still 
under threat. She cited a report by the World Health Organization (WHO) 
indicating that “depending on the country and the environment, between 10 and 
69 per cent women around the world reported being subjected to some form of 
violence in their lives.” 

WHO research has also demonstrated that every day, 1,600 women die due to 
complications related to pregnancy or childbirth, she said. Ninety-nine per 
cent of these deaths, most of them preventable, occur in developing 
countries. 

“If we are to meet the related MDGs of reversing HIV/AIDS and reducing the 
rate of maternal mortality by three-quarters by 2015, concerted action is 
needed to fully finance women’s health programmes, incorporate a gender 
perspective into health care and ensure quality of care in childbirth,” she 
declared. 

She called on the Commission to tackle these and other pressing issues. “Our 
vision is a world where girls and boys have equal opportunities for 
education, where mothers and children have equal access to better health care 
and medicines, where women and men share decision-making and household chores 
equally, equally enjoy fundamental human rights and strive equally to achieve 
peace, democracy, good governance, and sustainable development for their 
families and nations.” 


SOURCE: United Nations, New York