On 22 June, at 01:30am, an earthquake of magnitude 5.9 struck the south-eastern provinces of Paktika and Khost in the Central Region of Afghanistan.

Reti Khatun is a mother who lives in Kulpala village in Chuadanga, a district in southwest Bangladesh that is extremely vulnerable to climate change and long, devastating droughts in the summer. Her husband cannot work because of a disability, so she is the breadwinner of the family as well as caregiver. She used to clean houses for a living, but people stopped calling her during the COVID-19 pandemic.

In the wake of crisis, economic response and recovery plans often forget the needs of women and girls, hindering sustained peace and development. In Bangladesh, UN Women supports the Generation Equality Compact on Women Peace and Security and Humanitarian Action (WPS-HA) and is working with local partners to put recovery back on track by increasing economic security for crisis-affected women through grants and job training.

Through UN Women’s Safe Baucau and Safe Markets Initiative, has been giving the municipal authority technical advice on preparing a draft budget for 2023. With help from the Secretary State for Equality and Inclusion, UN Women and TOMAK have been training municipal officials on doing gender-responsive budgeting, including exercises on analyzing the budget and integrating specific gender-responsive items into it.

[Press release] UN Women and foodpanda Pakistan have reached a mutual understanding for the cooperation and promotion of gender equality in the workplace through initiatives undertaken to address and implement strategies pertaining to gender-responsiveness and an environment devoid of discrimination and harassment.

[Press release] New data from seven countries in the Asia-Pacific region shows that, since the onset of the COVID-19 crisis, more women than men have left their paid jobs to provide essential services to their families, such as cleaning, caring for the sick and home-schooling children. Tighter household budgets also mean that many are experiencing food hardship, while water and fuel are becoming increasingly unaffordable. Furthermore, medical and hygiene products remain unavailable to many, while supply-chain issues and misinformation about vaccines have left more women than men unvaccinated.

“We … have a host of cultural barriers that prevent women from seeking help. For example, victims of violence are often threatened not to go to court and are subject to extreme physical and psychological abuse. Women also find legal battles as a ‘hassle’ to their daily lives, because they have to juggle multiple responsibilities at home and work.

Based on international standards, many policies have been put forward to ensure the safety of women and to address inequalities. However, implementation is lacking. If a woman goes to the police station to make a complaint, the system is such that they don’t often feel safe and protected.

Myanmar’s population is facing a double crisis from the COVID-19 and the military takeover of February 2021, which is steadily wearing out their social and economic resilience.

[Press release] LinkedIn, the world’s largest professional network, announced today that they will be investing USD500,000 (INR3.88 crore) in a three-year, regional partnership with UN Women – the United Nations entity dedicated to gender equality – to advance women’s economic empowerment. The project will launch a pilot in Maharashtra, India to cultivate the digital, soft and employability skills of 2,000 women and present them with a range of career-building opportunities

Bangladesh has already demonstrated great success in disaster risk reduction. We have the National Development Framework that has powerful instructions for climate change and disaster risk reduction. We have our own local adaptation and mitigation strategy. But there is gap in translating those plans into concrete actions. So in order to advance toward the objectives of the 66th CSW, we need to be more action-oriented.

An international workshop to strengthen the capacities of female officers in leadership positions was held today in this city in Ha Nam province for 40 senior policewomen from northern provinces and Hanoi. The Department of Foreign Relations, Ministry of Public Security, hosted the workshop in partnership with UN Women.

The agreement was signed today in Lahore by Sharmeela Rassool, country representative of UN Women Pakistan, and Wajeeha Khalid, business head, Nishat Mills Ltd (Apparel Division). Nishat Mills is also a signatory of the global Women’s Empowerment Principles (WEPs), a set of guidelines for businesses to safeguard and promote women’s rights and empowerment in the workplace.

Women’s voice in decision-making is critical for the development of all. According to the NFHS-5 data for 2019-21 nearly 88.7 per cent of currently married Indian women tend to participate in key household decisions about healthcare for themselves, or make major household purchases.

The two agencies signed an inter-agency agreement for the period 2022-2026 to promote gender-responsive inclusive governance, social protection and disaster risk reduction, women’s economic empowerment and access to justice as well as to fight discrimination against women at all levels in Bangladesh.

UN Women and ILO have long been working with the Government to foster decent work, equal pay and access to resources for women. Both agencies excel in their respective areas of work: UN Women has cultivated strong civil society partnerships and ILO has close working relationship with employers’ and workers’ organizations. Combining these comparative advantages, UN Women and ILO are ideally positioned to promote voice, agency and choice for women and girls in Bangladesh.

Over 40 youth from across Nepal sent pitches for developing videos focusing on the social norm they wanted to change. Five pitches on the themes of Chhaupadi (a form of menstrual exile where women and girls sleep in small huts or animal sheds during menstruation and immediately after giving birth), caste-based discrimination, issues of queer and disability and gender identity were shortlisted for filmmaking.

To help fix the acute gender disparity in national political leadership in Papua New Guinea, UN Women is supporting training of a second group of female local politicians so they can rise up in the ranks. Politicians of district and provincial governments are being trained at the Political Academy for Women, which UN Women started last December in partnership with the Pacific Institute of Leadership and Governance. The Governments of Australia and New Zealand fund the project.

Remarks by Gitanjali Singh, Head of Office, a.i, UN Women Bangladesh. "Bangladesh has been a champion and front runner on disaster risk reduction and climate change action with UN Women being an integral part of it. Acknowledging these efforts and to advance these gains further with a focus on the priorities of marginalized women and girls, climate resilient infrastructure and increased gender responsive financing..."

“Women and men play a multi-faceted role in peacebuilding. Violent extremism is a phenomenon that impacts everyone and men and women are equally vulnerable to being affected and recruited by extremist ideologies,” says Durr e Maknoon, Director General Outreach of National Counter Terrorism Authority, Pakistan (NACTA).