ICRW Heads to the United Nations

This week, ICRW is headed to the United Nations (UN) to ensure that adolescent girls’ unique needs and priorities are a core component of any global development agenda.

The high-level meetings of the 69th United Nations General Assembly session kick off on Monday, September 22. To ensure that girls’ needs are not left behind as the UN develops the next round of global development goals, ICRW is hosting an event that same day, calling on global leaders to take action to empower girls around the world.

The event, Girls at the Center, will be opened by Cathy Russell, Ambassador-at-Large for Global Women’s Issues for the U.S. State Department, and will include ICRW’s Dr. Suzanne Petroni, Advocates for Youth’s M.A. Keifer, 18 year-old advocate and gender-based violence survivor Memory Banda, and Hon. Fawzia Koofi, a Member of Parliament and women’s rights advocate in Afghanistan. The event will feature the voices of girls around the world, as part of the Girl Declaration, a global call to action for the global community to include adolescent girls in the post-2015 development agenda.

ICRW will also be participating in a special session of the General Assembly (UNGASS), which will focus on the status of reproductive health and rights around the world. The UNGASS will take a look at challenges and barriers on the 20^th anniversary of the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD), and will serve as a launching point to galvanize the global community to finally achieve the ICPD’s objectives, including providing universal access to family planning, achieving gender equality, supporting sustainable development and addressing environmental challenges, and addressing the impacts of migration and urbanization.

In addition, ICRW President Sarah Degnan Kambou will be attending the Clinton Global Initiative’s annual meeting, working to ensure that women and girls are a key piece of the Initiative’s programs and projects around the world. She will also deliver remarks on women’s and girls’ financial health at an event hosted by the First Lady of Belize.

Our advocates in New York will ensure that women’s and girls’ needs are not relegated to the backburner in conversations about how to alleviate poverty around the world. Women and girls face unique challenges, including child marriage, gender-based violence, and lack of access to sexual and reproductive health and information. Yet when empowered, women and girls have the power to improve the lives of their families, those in their community, and even the economic and physical health of entire countries.

ICRW will be making sure that global leaders hear that message loud and clear.