women

Recently, IREX hosted four experts who offer up much needed wisdom during the panel discussion, “More than Victims: Women’s Roles in the Syrian Conflict.” Here are six concrete recommendations they made for the international development community:

We’re going to celebrate International Women’s Day this week, and when we do, the ceremonies will focus on outstanding women. These women will be heroes for all of us - every man, woman and child around the world. When women are able to play more useful and important roles in our societies, everyone benefits, and our horizons keep expanding.

Between International Women’s Day on the 8th and March being Women’s History Month, this is a time for IREX to reaffirm our ongoing commitment to gender equality and to examine how we and our partners around the world are advancing “The Gender Agenda.”

At this year's 16 Days Against Gender Violence kicks off on November 25, we're reminded of how complex and painful the issue of gender-based violence (GBV) is. Human trafficking, domestic violence, child marriage, anti-LGBT violence—GBV affects women, men, and children in every country and at every socioeconomic level.

When you think of a library, what comes to mind? Row after row of books? The Dewey Decimal System? Kids but no adults? Those stereotypes are outdated. Around the world, libraries are on the front lines of innovative development.

Last year, Karen Bovard, a teacher from Connecticut, traveled to Indonesia as a fellow of the TEA-ILEP U.S. Teacher Exchange Program. Upon returning, she created an advanced high school course called “Women in a Global Context” to cultivate an understanding of worldwide gender issues in her students. In this blog, Karen discusses the evolution of the course and what she learned from preparing and delivering it.

The Caucasus Research Resource Centers (CRRC), a nonprofit network of research and training centers in the South Caucasus, recently released a report by Georgian journalist Mariam Naskidashvili that provides some fascinating insights on Georgians’ attitudes toward work, education, and behaviors as they relate to gender.

I’ve just returned from a series of meetings in New York. With the UN General Assembly  and the annual Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) conference taking place, the energy in the international development community was palpable.

I was especially excited to learn about the new Girls Not Brides initiative launched at CGI by The Elders in partnership with the Ford and Nike Foundations, as gender is one of IREX’s core focus areas.

When the Thomson Reuters Foundation recently released the results of its poll on “The world’s five most dangerous countries for women”, Somalia, one of IREX’s program countries, was ranked fifth. We asked WAWA (the We Are Women Activists Network), one of our local partners on the Uniting Communities to Mitigate Conflict (UCMC) project, for their initial reactions to the report.

Annual observances such as Women’s History Month and International Women’s Day are useful tools for highlighting some of the many accomplishments of women as well as drawing much-needed attention to gender-based disparities around the globe.