5 Gender Equality Campaigns That Made a Huge Impact

Gender equality is essential to create a safer, better, more prosperous, and sustainable world. Unfortunately, women are not still safe in their own house, or in the communities, they do not have equal legal or social status in many countries. Till now there are 49 countries without any laws to protect against sexual violence or abuse and in 18 countries, husbands can legally prevent their wives from working. Women’s rights activism and feminist movements have started gaining momentum over the last two decades. These 5 gender equality campaigns made a huge impact over the last few years by engaging common people, leaders, empowering women, to create a more gender-equal, sustainable world.

HeForShe

Founded by UN Women in 2014, HeForShe movement aims in breaking social norms by signing primarily up men and boys to support gender equality. HeForShe believes that Gender equality is not a women’s issue but a threat to global human rights. They work as a systematic platform to engage boys and men in partnership with women in taking direct actions to eradicate discrimination, violence, and oppression against women. Since its launch, hundreds of thousands of men across all walks of society, including Global leaders, diplomats, CEOs have committed to this innovative initiative as a change maker. IMPACT 10x10x10 is a pilot initiative of HeForShe, where leaders from three sectors-Governments, corporate and academia would be engaged to a top-down approach in making real changes and measurable progress in gender equality issues in their respective sectors. #HeForShe

Also Read: Gender Equality Begins At Home: A Personal Reflection

UniTE to End Violence Against Women

UniTE to End Violence Against Women is a campaign launched by the United Nations Secretary-General in 2008 to end all forms of violence against all women in the world by actively engaging Policymakers as well as leaders from civil societies, private sectors, individuals and communities. The UNiTE campaign aims to enforce and implement laws and action plans to prevent violence against women and girls by educating and involving people from diverse backgrounds. This campaign also aims to address the worldwide use of sexual violence as a tactic of armed conflict. One of the key targets of the UNiTE campaign also is involving men and boys as active change-maker in this fight against sexual violence against women.

#UNiTE #UnitedNations

Empower women

In October 2011, UN Women and Canada jointly developed this online platform on women’s economic empowerment. Since then Empower Women has spread across 190 countries, created more than 410 Champions for women’s economic empowerment, and is the leading global movement for women’s economic empowerment. They are dedicated to empowering women economically by engaging and educating both women and men as advocates and change-makers through a common platform by networking, sharing, peer learning and mentoring. #EmpowerWomen

Also Read: Dr. Lina Abirafeh’s interview about her work to end gender-based violence.

MeToo

In 2006, Tarana Burke started the Me Too movement to extend support and empathy to survivors of sexual violence by creating a larger network of survivors. What started as a grass root level campaign in 2006, became a global movement by 2017 through viral#Metoo hashtag on social media and created a huge impact in several countries in the world. The purpose of this movement was to help the survivors heal and de-stigmatize and to validate the trauma and pain of the survivors. This movement is the voice of survivors of sexual harassment and violence and led by survivors for survivors. They were also fighting for systemic changes in the social and criminal justice system. #MeToo

Girl up

Girl Up is an initiative of the United Nations Foundation to engage and empower girls to stand up for each other and change the world. Girl Up provides leadership training and resources to girls to become gender equality advocates and leaders. Girls Up partnered with the United Nations to fund programs in five key areas -education, health, safety, leadership, and documentation. Gris Up was started as a campaign for American girls in 2010, but soon it began a global movement towards creating a network of girl leaders to transform the communities. To date, Girl Up has supported more than 34,000 girls worldwide through its different programs.

Also Read: Ananya Kamboj : Using Sports to Empower Girls and Women