After a few months of not blogging (due to a busy business traveling schedule), I am compelled to talk about a publication that was released by International Women’s Tribune Center in August 2006 called “UN Reform: What’s in it for Women?”. This book features reflections, insights and analysis by women from different regions specifically examining the impact of the UN reform process on women at the regional and national levels. It also presents different initiatives and proposals in ensuring women’s spaces within the UN as well as concrete recommendations on how to influence the UN reform process.
My first question when I saw this publication (as many of you may think the same way), what difference does this publication make especially in this world when UN policies don’t even matter in many countries’ domestic and foreign policies ? For many of us it seems that we hear of many atrocities that women, especially in the developing world, are enduring, but the world keeps watching.
However, despite all of this, the publication had some compelling statistics that most of us would be interested in knowing…
• over half of the world’s poor are women;
• up to 600,000 women die yearly in childbirth;
• up to 3 million women die each year as a result of gender-based violence or neglect;
• women account for almost half of all HIV/AIDS cases worldwide and up to 70 percent of cases in sub-Saharan Africa;
• a s many as 4 million girls and women a year are sold into prostitution;
• women are educationally short changed, with two thirds of the world’s 876 million illiterates being female; and
• women are more insecure in the working world – generally unemployed longer and more frequently than men and employed for lower wages.

The light at the end of the tunnel is that women activists who consider the UN as an important site of struggle are concerned that the political gains at the global level with respect to social justice, women’s rights and gender equality are eroding. At present a number of proposals on how to address this problem are being hotly debated – one proposal being the creation of a new women’s agency.
Aluta Continua!