DATE / TIME:

2018•03•08    09:00 - 12:00

Location:

Kuala Lumpur

By Invitation Only

International Women’s Day is a historically significant opportunity to celebrate the economic, social and political progress of women’s rights, while at the same time renewing commitments to address the remaining barriers to gender equality. The Gender Theme Group of the United Nations Country Team in Malaysia invites Malaysians from across all stakeholder groups to be part of a conversation on March 8^th this year, on the importance of gender equality and the pivotal role it plays in the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This is towards realising a fairer, more equitable society as envisioned within the Government of Malaysia’s Transformasi National 2050 (TN50) initiative, as well as in the declaration of 2018 as the Year of Women’s Empowerment.

One pertinent aspect of creating an enabling environment for gender equality is in the area of women’s health and rights, and the equity of access that can result from health systems that are increasingly gender responsive. Progress in the area of women’s health and rights has the potential to redress generational inequity and contribute to alleviating the remaining pockets of poverty and marginalization as well as ensure that the positive progress at national level is reflected within locally disaggregated data. Based upon this premise, the United Nations Country Team together with the United Nations University – International Institute for Global Health (UNU-IIGH) and the Delegation of the European Union to Malaysia, propose this year’s theme for International Women’s Day as ‘Towards Women’s Health and Rights: Leaving no one behind’.

In conjunction with this, a high-level panel forum of distinguished speakers has been invited to address the issues of women’s health and rights, in particular, non-communicable diseases, sexual and reproductive health and rights, and gender-based violence. UNU-IIGH has prepared technical papers which evaluate the available evidence on these issues in the context of gender equality. The event panel will also consider the confluence between women’s lived realities and the legal frameworks that exist to enable these rights, in the context of cultural complexities.

The proceedings are intended to stimulate a discussion on the reasons why gender and health are fundamental to the achievement of broader development targets as well as women’s human rights, and how health could have a potential cascade effect on the achievement of other gender equality goals that encompass economic, social and political progress. Such a positioning of issues sets the stage to examine the linkages between the key drivers which condition women’s access to sustainable development, and which may accelerate rights-based approaches to gender equality and women’s empowerment, towards achieving the Sustainable Development Goals.

Programme available here.