At UN, Pakistan says efforts underway towards gender equality and women’s empowerment

At UN, Pakistan says efforts underway towards gender equality and women’s empowerment

Pakistan’s democratically elected Pakistani is taking steps to realize Mohtarma Benazir Bhutto’s vision of gender equality and empowerment of women, a major UN forum was told on Thursday. Speaking in the UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), the Pakistan delegation leader, Senator Sardar Mohammad Latif Khan Khosa, said that under a four-pronged strategy, efforts were underway to reduce feminization of poverty; promote gender equality; end violence against women and introduce necessary legislative structure to empower women. Khosa, who is adviser to the prime minister, said Pakistan’s Constitution guaranteed equal rights for all its citizens and ensured full participation by women in all spheres of national life.

Pakistan was preparing a national plan to implement the commitments of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action aimed at improving the status of women on the basis of observations made by the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women.

Pakistan had the honour of electing Shaheed Mohtarma Benazir Bhutto as the first female Prime Minister in the Muslim world, and today it had South Asia’s first woman Speaker of the National Assembly, he told ECOSOC’s High-level segment.
The Government had recently adopted legislation to protect women’s rights, including a criminal law, and had moved a bill on protection against harassment in the workplace, in 2009, he said.
The Gender Reform Action Plan of the Ministry of Women’s Development also aimed to reform the gender agenda in a coherent
manner. Turning to the just-concluded Development Cooperation Forum, he said its deliberations this year had assumed particular significance owing to the troubled state of the global economy, and the consequent squeeze in resource flows to developing countries was expected to undermine their efforts to realize the Millennium Goals.
In that context, he said Pakistan viewed the Forum as a unique, inclusive platform for countries to voice their concerns and shape the international development cooperation framework.
Welcoming the creation of a new United Nations gender entity, he said the consolidation would help gender equality and women’s empowerment.

Earlier, Khosa also attended a ministerial breakfast convened by the Global Alliance for Information Technology for Development (GAID) on “The role of ICTs in empowering women with disabilities.
A number of eminent panelists who participated spoke about their experiences in how ICTs can be effectively deployed to empower women particulalrly those with disabilities. Khosa apprised the audience of the steps taken by Pakistan to promote information and knowledge dissemination, including the latest constitutional amendment ensuring access to knowledge and information as a human right.

The present government, he said, has made a special provision for stipends for students, particularly female students with disabilities from the ICT research and development fund.
He also highlighted steps taken by the Government towards economic empowerment of women as part of Benazir Income Support Programme (BISP).

He noted that the Government was fully cognizant of the importance of using information and communication technologies as a tool for the empowerment of women and recalled the special initiative of the Government under BISP to provide mobile telephone sets to women as well as smart cards.