The fourth Commonwealth Women’s Forum was held in Apia, Samoa, from 21 to 22 October 2024, bringing together close to 400 delegates from around the Commonwealth. The Forum explored the critical challenges and opportunities in advancing women’s empowerment and gender equality in the Commonwealth on the theme ‘Collective Action for a Resilient Commonwealth: Solidarity for Gender Equality’.
The Commonwealth Women's Forum recognised encouraging progress on advancing gender equality and women’s empowerment. This included increasing numbers of women in the parliaments of the Commonwealth, achieving gender parity in primary education, and widespread adoption of legislation on violence against women and girls.
However, the CWF highlighted that despite concerted efforts over the past decades, progress on GEWE remains uneven and is not advancing sufficiently fast to achieve the 2030 Agenda and Sustainable Development Goal 5 – ‘Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls’.