September 2016

Nadia Murad Basee Taha, a survivor of human trafficking at the hands of ISIS, has been appointed as Goodwill Ambassador for the Dignity of Survivors of Human Trafficking of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). The UNODC is the lead UN agency that combats all forms of human trafficking, including sexual slavery and forced labor. According to the UNODC, during her Ambassadorship, Nadia will concentrate on advocacy efforts and raise awareness about the plight of the countless […]

Women’s participation in the entrepreneurial sphere has long been studied and reviewed. The inaugural Mastercard’s “Women’s Entrepreneurial Index 2016” is the latest attempt to gauge women’s progress as entrepreneurs. The Mastercard study, which focused on 16 Asia Pacific countries, ranked New Zealand first (53.9), followed by Australia (51.7), Thailand (50.9), Philippines (50.6) and Singapore (50.1). At the bottom of the spectrum, India (33.3), Sri Lanka (32.7) and Bangladesh (27.0) received the lowest overall scores – 0 being the worst score […]

The United Nations (UN) has long been an advocate of women’s equality. Article 8 of the UN Charter states that “The United Nations shall place no restrictions on the eligibility of men and women to participate in any capacity and under conditions of equality in its principal and subsidiary organs.” Seventy years after its establishment, the UN has yet to achieve gender parity within its own organization. In the blog post entitled “Gender Equality At The UN: The Final Push?” […]

The conflict in Myanmar, also known as Burma, is considered as one of the world’s longest-running conflicts. The conflict started when Myanmar’s ethnic groups took up arms in a struggle for self-determination or greater autonomy soon after the country gained independence from British colonial rule in 1948. According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, the current Myanmar conflict has internally displaced 120,000 people in Rakhine State and 100,000 people in Kachin State. The UN humanitarian […]

Women have shouldered the brunt of the violent conflict in Syria. Virtually half of the Syrian internally displaced and refugees are women. Amidst the chaos brought about by the five-year-old conflict, Syrian women have risen in the local level as: Negotiators for securing local-level ceasefires and release of prisoners Distributors and monitors of humanitarian aid Organizers of safe spaces for women and children Documenters of human rights abuses In the article called “Leveraging leadership among Syrian women—a strong constituency for […]

The United Nations has welcomed the decision of the Council of State, France’s highest administrative court, in overturning a French town’s ban on burkini. The Council of State, in its ruling, found that the burkini ban by the French town of Villeneuve-Loubet violated religious freedom and freedom of movement. France’s highest administrative court also found that public officials who enacted the ban had failed to prove that the burkini posed a threat to the public. While the Villeneuve-Loubet’s ban does […]

The photograph of Omran Daqneesh, the five-year-old boy sitting in an ambulance chair with his face and body covered in dust and blood after being rescued from an airstrike, reminds the world yet again of the horrors faced by victims of the ongoing war in Syria. The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA) describes the ongoing war in Syria as “one of the most complex and dynamic humanitarian crises in the world today.” The Syrian war, […]