The last year has posed many hardships from the continued spread of COVID-19 and measures to stop it. Yet solidarity and support for realizing women’s rights never wavered in China. UN Women forged ahead through collective efforts and partnerships. We are proud to share some of our best results from 2022, knowing these are the foundation for much more to come in 2023.

Entrepreneurship is a catalyst for women’s economic empowerment. In China, as in the rest of the world, despite a recent surge in women’s entrepreneurship, women-owned businesses tend to be small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). SMEs are more vulnerable in emergencies than larger companies are, and many women-owned SMEs are situated in the service sector, which was hit the hardest by the pandemic.

Despite recent progress in advancing economic justice, the world economy still suffers from a gender gap, and China is no exception. The private sector is an important catalyst for sustainable and gender-inclusive development and economic growth.

The guideline provides detailed instructions for companies to publicly report on progress of promoting gender equality and women’s empowerment within the most widely used reporting frameworks including corporate social responsibility (CSR) reports, sustainability reports, and environmental, social and governance (ESG) reports, in line with the women’s empowerment principles (WEPs).

The toolkit provides a grounding in risk control and business continuity, with particular reference to the COVID-19 pandemic response. With its step-by-step guidance, checklist, and various tools, the toolkit becomes a self-learning tool for SME leaders across the world, so that they can better address risks and build their own gender- responsive business continuity management system.

UN Women is a lead technical partner for supporting gender mainstreaming in the programme. In 2021, in addition to the establishment of partnership, as a result of UN Women’s advocacy and technical support, a Gender Action Plan has been developed, with an aim for enhancing the gender responsiveness of the programme interventions, at a total cost of USD 173 million. The Gender Action Plan has been integrated into the Project Management Manual for local government partners for guiding implementation at 10 pilot counties in Hunan from 2022 to 2026.

UN Women and the Rockcheck Puji Foundation are committed to upholding women’s rights and their leadership potential in pandemic preparedness, response and recovery. In May 2020 UN Women China, funded by the Rockcheck Puji Foundation, launched Supporting women to recover from the socio-economic impacts of COVID-19, a project that focused on women entrepreneurs, workers and women-owned small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).

The 2019 Annual Report of the United Nations in China highlights results and impacts in the following priority areas; poverty reduction and equitable development, improved and sustainable environment, enhanced global engagement with an emphasis on cross-cutting areas such as gender equality, and leaving no one behind.

This bulletin features stories, events, announcements, publications and resources as well as updates on the implementation of WeEmpowerAsia programme.

This Monitoring Guide was developed in accordance with the third objective, with the goal of outlining international best practices and elaborating a set of criteria for how the ACWF and other actors might monitor developments in women’s political participation in China. After providing a short introduction to the current state of women’s political participation in China, the Guide presents a four-stage model of political...

Women are often discriminated against and have difficulty accessing formal employment. Chinese women continue to receive lower pay than men for performing the same job, are more likely to work in the informal sector, and often confined to positions that are aligned with socially constructed gender roles.

With a population of 13.4 million, Cambodia is one of the most populous countries in Southeast Asia, and also one of the poorest. 80 per cent of the population is rural, and an estimated one-third of Cambodians still live below the poverty line. i After decades of civil war, the country emerged from conflict in the early 1990s, and the reconstruction phase has seen some economic growth, as well as improvements in overall...