International Women’s Day: Women in leadership – achieving an equal future in a COVID-19 world

Women’s leadership brings essential knowledge, skills, resources and experience to emergency response and resilience building. When women are involved in the development and implementation of COVID-19 response plans they are more likely to consider the disproportionate impact that the pandemic is having on women and girls.

Around the Asia Pacific region, and globally, women have been leading COVID-19 responses in their communities and countries. Making decisions, developing policies, and implementing plans to ensure that the needs of women and girls are not forgotten, and that response and recovery is inclusive of all. From health workers treating COVID-19 patients to service providers supporting survivors of violence; from Prime Ministers leading national COVID-19 responses to women serving on community resilience groups, women are leading work to strengthen resilience and build back better from this pandemic. But we need more of them.

This International Women’s Day UNDRR’s Women’s International Network on Disaster Risk Reduction and UN Women’s Regional Office for Asia-Pacific will co-host a virtual event highlighting the need for women’s leadership in COVID-19 recovery, and recognizing the women who have played an essential role in their country’s COVID-19 response.

As part of this event UN Women and the Humanitarian Advisory Group will launch a new framework that tracks the progress and impact of women’s leadership and meaningful participation in COVID-19 responses in Asia and the Pacific. The framework builds on data from women’s rights organizations and women-led organizations, and helps to shed light not only on the need to strengthen women’s leadership but how to harmonize COVID-19 response efforts across numerous actors to effectively integrate women’s leadership in approaches to programming.

Time: 14:00 - 15:15 Bangkok Time

The event is being held under the auspices of the Women’s International Network on Disaster Risk Reduction (WIN DRR), UNDRR’s new network to promote and support women’s leadership in DRR. If you’d like to learn more about WIN DRR, join them on LinkedIn and Twitter.