Take Five: “The opportunity for sustainable energy entrepreneurship is significant for women”

Date: Monday, May 14, 2018

Suhela Khan currently leads UN Women’s joint programme with UNEP, called "Women’s Entrepreneurship for Sustainable Energy Programme" in India. Launched at COP 21 in six countries, the Programme works on identifying and removing structural gender-specific barriers that female energy entrepreneurs face, enhancing women’s productive use of sustainable energy, and increasing women’s participation and leadership in...

Expert’s take: Curbing the tide of violent extremism needs women’s voices and inclusion

Date: Monday, April 23, 2018

Many of the women of Marawi had seen this coming. They told us they had seen the escalation in ambushes and violence well before the siege, and also a surge in religious and conservative practices, such as the closure of entertainment venues and women and girls being forced to dress conservatively. When the fighting broke out, these women and their families fled the city, as their homes and livelihoods were destroyed. When I met her at an evacuation centre on the outskirts of Marawi nine months after the battle, she had little hope of seeing her home and business again. Marawi is the first city in the Philippines to have been completely destroyed...

Expert’s take: When building climate resilience, women’s needs cannot be an afterthought

Date: Wednesday, September 6, 2017

In May 2015, UN Women had organized an event in Dhaka on gender and climate change, during the high-level regional consultations on disaster risk reduction and climate resilience. A national expert was presenting the progress that Bangladesh had made in adapting to climate change. Listening with great attention was Mahera, who lives in the Khulna district of the remote Sundarban area, home to one of the largest mangrove forests in the world and a UNESCO World Heritage Site. She was there to...

Take five: “Women in the organization view themselves as leaders”

Date: Wednesday, March 1, 2017

I decided to build my career in two male-dominated industries—banking and law. When I started practising law there were partners (both women and men) that I worked for who asked me to make them coffee or pick up their dry cleaning, simply because I was a young woman. It was demoralising and disheartening. However, I also saw many people, again both women and men, who...