Leadership & Participation

UN Women Strategy

“You have to look out for becoming trapped in a place where people want to see you all the time doing one thing” – Lucy Liu

When Governments report women’s issues in International treaties, it not only helps to increase their accountability but also makes an impact on the lives of women.

UN Women works with elected women representatives and helps educate them about their rights, so that they can influence justice and public services. With funding from the Government of Norway, UN Women’s Gender Responsive Governance Programme promotes women’s political leadership and governance in India, Bhutan, Maldives and Sri Lanka.

UN Women’s programme for increasing the participation of women in public life has been designed with the intention of capturing specific issues and challenges with regard to women’s political empowerment that each country experiences. This is a demand driven programme that aims to understand and address issues of women’s participation in local governance from the grassroots perspective. The programme aims to strengthen federal structures to become gender sensitive and deliver for women and not expect women to deliver for local governance structures in South Asia.

In order to achieve this aim, the programme has adopted three main strategies:

• Support research and policy advocacy to address legal and political impediments to women’s political participation
• Support trainings, coalitions and lobbying (for example political parties) so that woman representatives transform and implement policies, programme and resource allocations in favour of women’s rights
• Strengthen key capacity development and media institutions in the region to mainstream gender responsive governance in their programme.

Currently the programme runs in five states and 16 districts of India, namely Madhya Pradesh, Odisha, Andhra Pradesh, Rajasthan and Karnataka. It works with 65,000 elected women representatives, touching 0.5 million women through Mahila Sabhas.