Women’s access to decision-making in the political, public and private sectors is essential to achieving gender equality.
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The approach of gender-inclusive growth is multi-faceted and requires the ending of discriminatory norms that deny women access to credit and financial services and keep them economically disempowered.
Violence against women and girls is one of the most pervasive human rights violations, having a detrimental impact on the rights of women and girls to non-discrimination, equal protection before the law and equality before the law.
Different genders experience climate change and disasters differently. Women and children are more likely to die, injured or be displaced by disasters, many exacerbated by climate change.
We work to advance gender equality, women’s rights and women’s empowerment in all social, economic and political spheres.
We provide technical assistance to member countries to support skills training and capacity building initiatives, monitoring and evaluation and high level advocacy, research and knowledge generation and lead the way for building consensus on key global priorities for gender equality for the Commonwealth.
Our work centers on key aspects of human development towards the achievement of the Commonwealth’s priorities on gender equality: (i) women in leadership; (ii) women’s economic empowerment; (iii) ending violence against women and girls; and (iv) gender and climate change; the 2030 Agenda and the Sustainable Development Goals, and global, regional and national commitments on gender equality and overall empowerment of women.
There are three inter-linked functions to our gender work:
Commonwealth Women's Forum CHOGM 2018
The Commonwealth Women's Forum (CWF) is held at Commonwealth Heads of Government Meetings (CHOGM), with the first having taken place at Malta. The theme for the 2018 CWF was "An empowered future for women and girls".
Commonwealth Women's Forum 2018 Report
The Commonwealth has announced a new partnership designed to reduce domestic violence in member countries. Today, Secretary-General Patricia Scotland signed a memorandum of understanding with the NO MORE Foundation which is a global movement of 1,400 allied organisations and 40 international chapters working together to stop and prevent domestic violence and sexual assault.
Commonwealth Deputy Secretary-General Dr Arjoon Suddhoo has said more must be done to address the fact that women account for two-thirds of the world’s illiterate population.
The Commonwealth has partnered-up with the Malawi Centre for Multi-Party Democracy (CMD-M) for a workshop designed to advance women’s political party leadership, strategy, advocacy and engagement.
Malawian women in politics have been taking stock of their success in the May elections and brainstorming how to gain an even greater say in the running of their country.
The Commonwealth has called on its member countries to collect and share data of victims of gender-based killings.
A new Commonwealth paper finds “impressive improvements” in women’s access to maternal health, enrolment in primary school and participation in the workforce. The technical paper was released at the 12th Women’s Affairs Ministers Meeting in Nairobi, Kenya.
