ISLAMABAD: Denmark on Wednesday announced a grant of $1 million to support the UN Women Country Programme to encourage the role of women in promoting peace and security in Pakistan.

With this grant, Denmark has become the first country to contribute towards the UN women programme in the country. The grant was announced by Danish Ambassador to Pakistan Jesper Moller Sorensen at the signing of an agreement with Joana Merlin, senior country adviser to UN Women Programme in Pakistan.

The current programme focuses on promoting peace and security, and humanitarian actions shaped by women’s leadership and participation.

Ambassador Sorensen said that Pakistan, particularly its female population, had suffered a lot because of crisis and disasters over the past many years.

“Today is an important day to us as Denmark pledges its support to a programme, which has a new facet to support vulnerable women in Pakistan,” he said.

Through this partnership, he said, “we aim to promote security and protect the rights of women and girls in stabilisation, social reconstruction and peace-building processes. The programme also aims to ensure women and girls are engaged as change agents and promote gender equality commitments in disasters and complex emergencies on both policy and institutional level”.

The ambassador said that promoting gender equality was a consistent feature in all Denmark’s development and humanitarian assistance programmes. Denmark had been actively supporting gender equality programmes in Pakistan since 2010.

“Our support to work on gender equality is based on a rights-based approach that focuses on improving women’s access to rights, resources and inuence,” he said.

Joana Merlin of the UN said that women, peace and security were the central area in crisis situations irrespective of whether they were related to human-made or natural disaster. She said that recent crises affecting Pakistan had highlighted gaps in emergency preparedness, early warning systems, and other disaster risk reduction.

The management capacities called for a comprehensive, swift and gender sensitive response towards stabilisation and social reconstruction, she emphasised.

She said that the grant would be utilised to support the UN’s women´s programme to work with the government and key partners in the field.

Published in Dawn, July 10th, 2014