UNITED NATIONS, March 2: Pakistan is doing its utmost to promote gender equality and drastically lower tolerance levels for violence against women, a UN panel was told on Thursday.
At the same time, Sohail Safdar, Pakistan’s delegate to the UN Commission on the Status of Women, called the feminisation of poverty as one of the greatest challenges facing the international community.
Statistics, he said, reveal that 70 per cent of the world’s poorest people are women, whether it is income poverty or lack of opportunities, denial of rights and decision-making.
“Pakistan is committed to gender equality and empowerment of women through sustained and vigorous policies at the national level,” Mr Safdar, who is also secretary of the ministry for women development, told the 45-member commission. “Women’s political empowerment is a strong area where Pakistan has set a model in the region”.
More than a decade after the fourth world conference on women was held in 1995 in Beijing, the commission is focusing on two themes that it believes are crucial to women’s progress around the world: their participation in development and their role in decision-making in all areas of society, from politics to business to media.
More than 2,000 representatives of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) are taking part in the session.
The Pakistan delegate said the international community had come a long way in realising that the goals of development and poverty reduction could not be achieved without empowerment of women. Pakistan had taken many initiatives for women’s economic empowerment, including the operationalisation of the National Fund for Advancement of Rural Women to promote income generation for rural women through skills development. A permanent National Commission on the Status of Women was fully functional and looked into all discriminatory laws and made recommendations to the government.
Mr Safdar said Pakistan had established a mechanism to achieve the internationally accepted Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) aimed at halving poverty by 2015 with the objective of empowering women and ensuring gender equality through poverty alleviation measures.
“We are confident ... (that) with our economy on a high growth path, the country will be able to achieve most of the MDGs by 2015,” the Pakistani delegate said. “Poverty shall not have a feminine face.”
Two other members of the Pakistan delegation — Senator Muhammad Saeed Siddique and Senator Nighat Agha — participated in other panels of the commission.
Mr Siddique proposed an institutionalised mechanism under the overall supervision of the Inter-Parliamentry Union (IPU) to train new parliamentarians and enable them to make a meaningful contribution to the legislative work in their respections parliaments. He also proposed that all parliamentarians, especially women, should be provided research staff for better understanding of issues that would make their work more effective.
Nighat Agha said that President Musharraf’s vision of women empowerment was being effectively implemented through solid steps such as increasing female representation from two per cent in the past to 18 per cent. Pakistani society has accepted the change resulting from greater representation of women, initial problems notwithstanding. Women representatives were playing an assertive and serious role. Although changes do not take place overnight, she said, progress towards women’s development in Pakistan had been tremendous. —APP