UN Women Ethiopia changing the lives of women and girls

“As we start re-energized in the year of 2016, UN Women Ethiopia took some time to reflect on some milestones and successes achieved in 2015.

2015 saw the adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals, the adoption of the Addis Ababa Action Agenda on Financing for Development, the finalization of the 2nd Ethiopia Growth and Transformation Plan (GTPII) as well as the new United Nations Development Framework (UNDAF) for Ethiopia. All these had a strong commitment on gender equality and women’s empowerment – thanks to the hard work by all of us.

At the Africa Union level, the dedication of the year as the “Year of Women’s Empowerment and Development towards Africa’s Agenda 2063” was historic. Africa and indeed the whole world came together to review progress achieved 20 years after the adoption of the Beijing Platform for Action. From this review we heard loud and clear calls from the women’s movement that it is high time to move from ‘declarations to deliverables’. As the year drew to a close, the First Africa Girls’ summit was held in Lusaka, Zambia, and again the call to end child marriage in Africa by 2030 was loud and clear. Many more such high level events took place in the year.

In this issue UN Women shares a few highlights of the AU Year of Women (page 3). We succeeded in firmly placing gender equality and women’s empowerment at the center of the development discourse. We further amplified the voices of women by providing various platforms to share success stories and changing the narrative of Africa from a women’s perspective through a documentary series on the Theme of the year. Our coordination mandate was put to practice at all levels from global, regional, national, UN, civil society, and development partners as demonstrated in our Best Practice on Coordination (page 4).

We have provided technical expertise to the Government of Ethiopia by integrating a module on Violence against Women in the upcoming Ethiopia Demographic Survey (EDHS) (Page 2). This work is strategic and not only ensures collection and use of sex-disaggregated data but in demonstrating the high level policy support to the Government as it moves to becoming a Middle Income Country. Last but not least we share a successful strategy of using Com-munity Conversations to share personal experiences of migrant women with a view to reduce illegal migration from Ethiopia and to protect women from risks involved in migration (page 7).

I thank all of you for ‘Walking the Talk’ with us and being loyal partners and our allies in trying to make the world more gender equal and just for all. We do look forward to working with you in the future and to take policy commitments from paper to action!”

Letty Chiwara
UN Women Representative to Ethiopia, AUC and UNECA.