Direct Link to Full 8-Page Publication:
http://e.savethechildren.org/a/hBgDwcmB8yKeXB93-G4AAEMh8jx/stress
International Women’s Day 2021– “Women in Leadership: Achieving an Equal Future in a COVID-19 World”
UN Women announces the theme for International Women’s Day, 8 March 2021 (IWD 2021) as, “Women in leadership: Achieving an equal future in a COVID-19 world.”
The theme celebrates the tremendous efforts by women and girls around the world in shaping a more equal future and recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic.
It is also aligned with the priority theme of the 65th session of the Commission on the Status of Women, “Women's full and effective participation and decision-making in public life, as well as the elimination of violence, for achieving gender equality and the empowerment of all women and girls”, and the flagship Generation Equality campaign, which calls for women’s right to decision-making in all areas of life, equal pay, equal sharing of unpaid care and domestic work, an end all forms of violence against women and girls, and health-care services that respond to their needs.
Women stand at the front lines of the COVID-19 crisis, as health care workers, caregivers, innovators, community organizers and as some of the most exemplary and effective national leaders in combating the pandemic. The crisis has highlighted both the centrality of their contributions and the disproportionate burdens that women carry.
By Melinda Gates - Co-Chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, founder of Pivotal Ventures, & author of The Moment of Lift.
JANUARY 15, 2021 - Right around this time last year, many of us at the Gates Foundation were starting to worry that the public health crisis emerging in Wuhan would soon be felt everywhere we work. With each passing week, it was becoming clearer that the new coronavirus was unlikely to be contained and a once-in-a-century pandemic was looming. While the world didn’t know much about COVID-19 yet, I was certain of one thing: a pandemic would lead to devastating setbacks for women everywhere.
This was an abrupt shift in my outlook. I’d spent 2019 telling anyone who would listen that 2020 was going to be a landmark year for gender equality. In April, I’d released my book The Moment of Lift: How Empowering Women Changes the World, which argues that even in a world where men usually set policy, it’s women who drive progress. I spent the rest of the year collaborating with partners on a major push to expand women’s power and influence in the United States. I wasn’t alone in believing we were on the cusp of a new era for women and girls.
But when the pandemic hit, my optimism began to buckle. Disease outbreaks always impact women disproportionately, and COVID-19 was unlikely to be the exception. Gender equality advocates began bracing for a catastrophic wave of shadow pandemics.
Direct Link to Full 18-Page GWI Toolkit:
2021-GWI-International-Day-of-Education-Toolkit-.pdf (graduatewomen.org)
The analysis of the social protection responses to the COVID-19 pandemic has brought to light two key lessons: the first is the need for an approach flexible enough to recognize the multiple needs and dimensions of informal workers’ lives. The second is the importance of having systems, institutions and spaces of social dialogue in place that are not only robust enough to support current beneficiaries, but to step up to the plate when unforeseen shocks occur.
By Cyrus Afshar, Annie Devenish
The COVID-19 pandemic represents a huge challenge to governments around the globe, not only as a health emergency, but also as a deep economic crisis, affecting both supply and demand. Millions of workers have had their livelihoods and security affected. With formal workers buffered to some extent by the protection provided through their formalized work relations, and the poorest of the poor able to cling to their pre-existing lifeline of governmental social assistance, it was the ‘missing middle’, often uncovered by any protection programmes, that governments had to scramble to reach. Many of the ‘missing middle’ are informal economy workers. As a result, the crisis has brought the needs of informal workers to the fore, making them visible in a way they had not been before.
