Oct 2008 - Feb 2009

OHCHR organised training activities on women’s rights and violence against women for Arab-speaking NGOs; Iraqi NGOs; judges from the United Arab Emirates; NGOs and parliamentarians from Bahrain. Gender-based violence in Sudan was also covered.

UN-HABITAT has commissioned the preparation of a publication “Using Planning to Combat Violence Against Women”, geared towards stakeholders dealing with women’s rights, urban planning and human settlements.

UNFPA published the technical report of the Global Consultation on female genital mutilation/cutting, held in Addis Ababa, in 2007.

In follow up to the recommendations of the UN Study on Violence against Children, and in preparation or the World Congress III, UNICEF continued to support research, studies and data collection on different forms of violence against girls, including in collaboration with other stakeholders, such as ILO-IPEC, IOM, ECPAT, and Save the Children.

UNHCR has conducted in-depth assessments on vulnerabilities and at risk groups in refugee camps in Kenya and Tanzania. Protection interventions have been developed to combat sexual exploitation of children.

UNHCR has included a section in the Health Information System (HIS) to collect data on injuries reported at health centers, disaggregated by age and sex.

UNIFEM, now part of UN Women, provided support to national surveys on gender-based violence in Rwanda, Sierra Leone and Uganda, as well as the second iteration of the Cambodian Gender Assessment, including in regard to violence against women.

ESCAP held an expert group meeting on “Gender statistics and the use of violence against women indicators in support of the implementation of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) and the Beijing Platform for Action (BPfA)”, in October 2008. It aimed at building partnerships between national statistical offices (NSOs) and national women’s machineries (NWMs) in the development and use of statistics in policymaking, implementation and monitoring.

UNECE, together with the World Bank Institute, published a 15 minute video on gender-based violence and issues in its measurement (www.unece.org/stats/video/violence.htm).

In order to define the basic set of indicators necessary for the functioning of the ECLAC Gender Observatory, two technical meetings were organized, with representatives from National Machineries for the Advancement of Women/Gender Affairs and National Statistical Offices of Latin America (Aguascalientes (Mexico), in October 2008) and the Caribbean (Port-of-Spain, in December 2008). Reports of both meetings were approved at the Forty-second meeting of the Presiding Officers of the Regional Conference on Women in Latin America and the Caribbean (Santiago, December 2008).