Do your bit: Focus on days highlighting international issues International Days and Observances
Intl. Women's Day
8 Mar
With gender-based discrimination still widespread around the world, the International Women's Day campaigns to promote and protect women's equal rights - as a fundamental human right.

2023

The 2023 theme focusses on
"DigitALL: Innovation and technology for gender equality"

This theme is aligned with the priority theme for the upcoming 67th Session of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW-67), “Innovation and technological change, and education in the digital age for achieving gender equality and the empowerment of all women and girls”. ... More info

8 March is also the United Nations Day for Women's Rights and International Peace

O

ver the years, action for the advancement of women has taken four clear directions: (1) promotion of legal measures; (2) mobilization of public opinion and international action; (3) training and research, including the compilation of gender desegregated statistics; and (4) direct assistance to disadvantaged groups. A central organizing principle is that no enduring solution to society's most threatening social, economic and political problems can be found without the full participation, and the full empowerment, of the world's women.

International Women's Day has assumed a new global dimension for women in developed and developing countries alike. The growing international women's movement, which has been strengthened by four global United Nations women's conferences, has helped make the commemoration a rallying point for coordinated efforts to demand women's rights and participation in the political and economic process.

Gender equality and women’s empowerment are fundamental to the global mission of the United Nations to achieve equal rights and dignity for all. This is a matter of basic human rights, as enshrined in our founding Charter and the Universal Declaration. It is part of the Organization’s very identity.

But equality for women and girls is also an economic and social imperative. Until women and girls are liberated from poverty and injustice, all our goals -- peace, security, sustainable development -- stand in jeopardy.

- Ban Ki Moon, former UN Secretary General

Increasingly, International Women's Day is a time to reflect on progress made, to call for change and to celebrate acts of courage and determination by ordinary women who have played an extraordinary role in the history of women's rights.

GDRC has been working on themes related to this international day/observance, in its programme on Gender and Development.

GDRC therefore reaffirms its committment to uphold the objectives of the International Women's Day, and work towards better understanding of, and action on, promoting and protecting women's equal rights - as a fundamental human right.

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