UN Women is leading and supporting the Beijing+20 India CSO National Consultation in second week of August in New Delhi.

New Delhi: A visionary roadmap to achieve gender equality in India, and globally, the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action (BPfA), a twenty year old initiative by the Beijing government, is proposing all the Civil Society Organizations (CSO) in India to come together to participate in the Beijing+20 India CSO National Consultation, supported by UNO.

UN Women is leading and supporting the Beijing+20 India CSO National Consultation on 11 and 12 August in New Delhi.

“UN Women is the lead convener on gender equality and women’s empowerment within the United Nations system. We have the mandate to strengthen the norms, frameworks and policies that promote gender equality and the obligation to create the necessary impetus to see them implemented. Women’s groups and the civil society are our some of our strongest partners and so we collaborate with them for the Beijing+20 political and social mobilization efforts. The goal is to strengthen the gender equality agenda through civil society participation in India and across the world, and strengthen resource contribution to it,” says Ms. Lopa Banerjee, Chief of Civil Society Section, UN Women.

The Beijing+20 India CSO national consultation is a vibrant convergence of India’s key civil society organizations and will discuss future actions, challenges and opportunities for women’s movements in the country, in addition to reviewing the implementation of the BPfA in the last 20 years. The consultation will input into major global processes, which will help to deconstruct and strategies for more effective gender equality interventions in the near-future.

“The Beijing+20 campaign is aptly called ‘Empowering Women, Empowering Humanity, Picture it!’ - we would like to re-energize the women’s rights movement, reinstate commitment to gender equality goals, give gender inequality an expiration date and inspire people to imagine a world where women have equal rights, and have realized their full potential. India remains a complex and a pivotal country for gender equality work and meetings such as these help to acknowledge successes, identify challenges, and formulate effective solutions that can be implemented in India and beyond. The outputs of the India national consultation will be used to inform the Asia-Pacific regional Beijing+20 review and subsequently the 59th Session of the Commission on the Status of Women in New York in March 2015,” says Dr. Rebecca Tavares, Representation, UN Women Office for India, Bhutan, Maldives & Sri Lanka.