06 March 2008

On International Women’s Day (IWD), 8 March, the United Nations is urging everyone to help end all forms of violence against women. In his statement for this year’s IWD, UN Secretary General Ban Kyi-Moon says that failure to address women’s issues holds back all efforts in reaching the Millennium Development Goals. 

The UN Volunteers programme, together with its thousands of volunteers worldwide, has shown a strong commitment to achieving gender equality and women’s empowerment. One of the critical areas that UNV is addressing is female genital mutilation, a fundamental violation of human rights that causes severe pain, trauma, sexual dysfunction and other health complications for women and girls. The following are some examples:
 

• In Sudan, UNV volunteers together with UNFPA, mobilized 30 community volunteers in Abu Seid, south of Khartoum. One third of these were men. They focused on involving men in peer education, key players like midwives in sexual education, and schools in raising the awareness of schoolchildren. Read

• An FGM-Free Village Model in Egypt that was initiated in 2003 with 60 villages has now expanded to 120 villages. The project addresses communities as a whole with the aim of creating an environment conducive to dialogue and thus empowering families to abandon FGM. The practice affects some 96 per cent of Egyptian women. Read

• UNV has joined UNIFEM’s “Say NO to Violence Against Women”,  a global effort inviting people sign to a virtual petition as an expression of public support and to call on decision-makers worldwide to make it a top priority to end violence against women.
  

 
Read more stories on gender and volunteering
Read the UN Secretary General’s IWD 2008 message
Learn more about the “Say NO to Violence” campaign
Visit the official website of International Women’s Day 2008