by admin | May 25, 2021 | Entrepreneurship, News, Women Entrepreneur
By Arul Louis,
United Nations : India has shared with other countries its insights on empowering rural women and girls at an event on the sidelines of the meeting of the Commission on the Status of Women drawing on its many programmes.
Leaders, diplomats and activists heard about how India was combating domestic violence, trying to right the unbalanced sex ratio, increasing women’s political participation and providing financial services and educational opportunities for women and girls.
This was at the session on “Challenges and opportunities in achieving gender equality and the empowerment of rural women and girls: Experiences from India” organised by India’s UN Mission and UN Women on Wednesday.
The deeply entrenched patriarchal mindset is responsible for many of the problems women face and action to change them must be taken on a warfooting, said Nandini Azad, president of the Indian Co-operative Network for Women.
It has to start with resocialisation of boys, who have been trained in patriarchy and consider violence against women and various forms of oppressing them to be normal, she said and recounted her experiences with conducting workshops for boys and campaigns.
The sex ratio imbalance is a serious issue and finding a solution has to start with making the girl child valuable, Azad said.
While prosecuting sex-selected foeticide and providing for the health of girls are vital, changing the mindset is more important and India was undertaking one of the biggest campaigns for it, she added.
Subhalakshmi Nandi of UN Women India said that the ads and jingles produced for the campaign can have an impact in changing the mindset by starting a discussions on the status of women and reconsidering patriarchy.
To help women in rural areas deal with domestic violence, India has set up one-stop centres where women can get police action, psychosocial help, medical care and legal assistance, said Jupaka Madhavi, a Senior Consultant with the National Mission for Empowerment of Women.
India started with 36 such centres where women can get all the help in one place, and after two years it is now increasing them to 286 centres, she said.
The centres are called “Sakhi” or “Friend” and they are developed appropriately into places where women can find people to speak and find shelter, she said.
The data gathered about the women, their experiences and the perpetrators of violence are monitored in Delhi in realtime so they can get a picture of what is happening around the country and focus their action accordingly, Madhavi said.
Paulomi Tripathi, a diplomat at India’s UN Mission, said because of the size of India’s population and the large number of women living in rural areas, the government’s programmes to raise their status and empower them will have a global impact and be essential for achieving the UN’s sustainable development goals.
India’s efforts for bettering the lives of women and girls in rural areas are multi-dimensional and touch every vital area of their lives, she added.
Chetan Sanghi, a Joint Secretary in the Ministry of Women and Child Development, said: “We would like to change the paradigm to women-led development.”
If there was one area where there is consensus across the political spectrum, it is on improving the status of women, he said, listing 24 programmes that Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government has undertaken to specifically benefit women.
These range from providing free cooking gas and constructing toilets to ensuring availability of financial services and digital training in rural areas, he said.
On social issues, India has taken long strides like outlawing instant divorce, he said.
It has by law increased paid maternity leave to six months from three months, he said.
Although some responses to it were not positive and some employers demurred in allowing them or discriminated in hiring because of it, virtual portals were set up for complaints and employers were made to change their decisions, he added.
In politics, there are 1.3 million elected women representatives at the local level and 20,000 of them have so far undergone training to enable them to take charge and act independently, he said.
(Arul Louis can be reached at arul.l@ians.in)
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Employment, Entrepreneurship, Startup Basics, Women Entrepreneur
UN General Assembly President Miroslav Lajcak
By Arul Louis,
United Nations : UN General Assembly President Miroslav Lajcak has held up Sunita Kashyap, the founder of Umang, as an example of women empowering themselves and coming up with solutions to their problems.
While women face challenges, “rural women act as a major source of innovation, and ideas,” he told the inaugural session of the UN Commission on Status of Women (CSW) meeting here on Monday.
“Take, for example, a woman named Sunita Kashyap. Her organisation supports 3,000 women farmers in India to grow and sell their own crops.
“These kinds of women do not need our help, in finding solutions” he added. “What they need is our support, in turning their ideas into reality.”
This year’s meeting of the CSW focuses on achieving gender equality and empowerment of rural women and girls.
“The empowerment of rural women will result in opportunities,” Lajcak said. “Not just for them – but for us all.”
He said that “until every woman, sitting in this room today, has the same rights, and the same opportunities, as the man sitting beside her,” the calls for their empowerment should be kept up.
Kashyap founded Mahila Umang Producers Co., an organisation in Uttarkhand run by women farmers and producers. Besides marketing their products, it runs a micro-credit programme.
Lajcak also cited the work of Mariama Mamane, a Kenyan who developed an eco-solution to improve the availability of irrigation and drinking water, while also producing energy.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said: “We often talk about empowering women. When women are already taking action, we need to listen to them and to support them.”
“They may be experts on climate resilience and on sustainable development,” he said.
“Centuries of patriarchy and discrimination have left a damaging legacy,” he said. “We live in a male-dominated world with a male-dominated culture. And that is why the empowerment of women and girls is our common central objective.”
(Arul Louis can be reached at arul.l@ians.in)
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Markets, Social Media, World
A girl standing in front of a UN shelter for the internally displaced Rohingya in Myanmar. (Image: Reuters)
Geneva : The UN human rights experts have blamed Facebook for playing a key role in spreading hate speech against the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar.
Marzuki Darusman, Chairman of the UN Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar, said on Monday that the social media platform had played a “determining role” in Myanmar.
“As far as the Myanmar situation is concerned, social media is Facebook, and Facebook is social media,” ABC Online quoted Darusman as saying.
More than 650,000 Rohingya Muslims have fled Myanmar’s Rakhine state into Bangladesh since insurgent attacks sparked a security crackdown last August.
“(Social media) has … substantively contributed to the level of acrimony and dissention and conflict, if you will, within the public a Hate speech is certainly of course a part of that,” said Darusman.
UN Myanmar investigator Yanghee Lee said that “everything is done through Facebook in Myanmar,” adding it has been used to spread hate speech.
“I’m afraid that Facebook has now turned into a beast, and not what it originally intended,” she said.
Lee was speaking at the UN’s Human Rights Council in Geneva.
Facebook did not immediately comment on the fresh charges.
Lee, who was banned from Myanmar last year after it claimed a previous report by her was biased and unfair, said she had seen evidence that Myanmar’s military was continuing to target the Rohingya, razing their villages.
Last week, Sri Lanka barred social messaging networks, including Facebook, following violence against minority Muslims in Kandy district.
The government ordered internet and mobile service providers to temporarily block Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram, as well as messaging service Viber, after officials said these platforms were fueling online hate speech.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | World
By Arul Louis,
United Nations : UN Under-Secretary-General Jeffrey Feltman is to visit the Sri Lankan city of Kandy, at the centre of incidents of communal violence. He will meet religious leaders there this week, a UN spokesperson said.
UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres is concerned by reports of communal violence in Sri Lanka and is urging dialogue to solve the differences, his Spokesperson Stephane Dujarric said on Tuesday while announcing the visit.
The visit by Feltman, who is in-charge of Political Affairs at the UN, starts on Friday and it is “part of ongoing UN engagement with Sri Lanka”, Dujarric said.
During the three-day visit, Feltman is also expected to meet Sri Lankan President Maithripala Sirisena, Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe and representatives of political parties and civil society groups, he said.
“We’re obviously concerned over the reports of the ongoing communal violence, and we welcome the government’s commitment to addressing the tensions and achieve reconciliation,” Dujarric said. “We urge all Sri Lankans to resolve their differences through dialogue.”
On Tuesday, Maithripala Sirisena declared a 10-day state of Emergency after communal clashes involving Buddhists and Muslims erupted in Kandy district.
The violence flared up on Sunday after the funeral of a Sinhala Buddhist truck driver who died after a confrontation involving Muslims, according to officials.
One Muslim man was reportedly killed when Sinhala mobs attacked Muslim houses and businesses, setting some on fire.
The government has deployed police and military forces to patrol potential trouble spots to prevent violence.
In February in another incident, five persons were injured and several shops and a mosque damaged in a clash involving the same communities in Ampara in eastern Sri Lanka.
(Arul Louis can be reached at arul.l@ians.in)
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | World
Nay Pyi Taw : The ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya Muslim minority in Myanmar is continuing in Rakhine state, from where at least 700,000 people have fled to Bangladesh since August 2017, the UN said Tuesday.
The UN and human rights organisations have repeatedly criticised the atrocities allegedly committed by the Myanmar military in a campaign against the Rohingya that began in northern Rakhine following a coordinated assault by the Rohingya insurgent movement on August 25, 2017, reports Efe news.
UN Assistant Secretary-General for Human Rights Andrew Gilmour said that while the level of violence had been reduced, murder, rape, torture, abductions as well as forced starvation continued.
“It appears that widespread and systematic violence against the Rohingya persists,” Gilmour said in a statement issued after his visit to refugee camps in Bangladesh.
“The nature of the violence has changed from the frenzied blood-letting and mass rape of last year to a lower intensity campaign of terror and forced starvation that seems to be designed to drive the remaining Rohingya from their homes and into Bangladesh,” he added.
The UN expert also questioned how the Myanmar government could say that it was ready for the return of the Rohingya refugees while atrocities committed against them continued, and argued that “safe, dignified and sustainable returns are of course impossible under current conditions”.
Gilmour also praised the humanitarian response of Bangladesh and other international organizations to the Rohingya refugee crisis, but warned that the rainy season could leave “a devastating effect” on the refugee camps.
Bangladesh and Myanmar signed an agreement to start repatriating the Rohingya refugees at the end of January but the deal was suspended at the last minute by the Dhaka government.
The Myanmar military has denied claims of abuses, but in January recognised the extrajudicial killings of Rohingya in September 2017.
Myanmar does not recognize Rohingya as its citizens, arguing they are illegal immigrants from neighbouring Bangladesh, which has led to continued discrimination against the Rohingya community as well as restrictions on their freedom of movement.
—IANS
