Advocacy & Lobbying
Since 2012, Mali has been in security turmoil with the emergence and expansion of several radical non-State armed groups: Jamāʿat Nuṣrat al-Islām wal-Muslimīn (JNIM), Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQMI), Katiba Macina, Al Mourabitoun, and the Islamic State Sahel Province (EIGS). These groups demand the independence and empowerment of territories in the northern region of the country, using targeted violent action to weaken and overthrow the powers that be. The current state of affairs has led to ongoing security disruptions across Mali and other Central Sahel countries.
Today, the security situation in Mali, a member of the Alliance of Sahel States (AES) that withdrew from the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) on January 28, 2024, has been marked by clashes between the Malian armed forces and their allies and non-State armed groups. This situation continues to disproportionately affect the civilian population, especially women and girls who are often victims of sexual violence.
According to the United Nations Population Fund’s (UNFPA) May 2025 Mali Situation Report, the armed groups’ attacks also result in forced marriages and considerably limit access to essential sexual and reproductive health and protection services.
Over the past decade Somaliland has seen a worrying convergence of political exclusion for women and active pushback against progressive sexual-offences laws and gender-equity measures. The result is not only weaker legal protection for survivors, but social environments that enable sexual violence and silence victims. This article examines recent examples and reports, connects them to the rollback of protections and low female political representation, and outlines the human-rights and social costs for Somaliland’s women and girls.
This article is released by the Women’s Human Rights, Education & Environment Association (WHEEA), with KOMBOA through the Strategic Initiative for Women in the Horn of Africa (SIHA) Network. It aims to expose the growing impact of backlash against the women’s rights movement in Somaliland, particularly following the rejection of progressive sexual-offences legislation. By documenting recent cases of sexual violence, political exclusion, and institutional failures, the article highlights how resistance to women’s rights has deepened impunity and vulnerability for women and girls. In addition to analysis, the article provides concrete policy recommendations for lawmakers, religious leaders, civil society, and international partners to strengthen protection, accountability, and women’s political participation in Somaliland.
“Closing the gender pay and pension gaps is not only a matter of fairness, but also a strategic economic necessity for Europe’s competitiveness, growth, and fiscal sustainability,” said Mirosława Nykiel MEP, negotiator of the report on gender pay and pension gaps in Parliament’s Committee on Women’s Rights and gender equality, after the vote.
“At a time of growing geopolitical pressure and unfair international competition, Europe must fully harness all its talents. Closing these gender gaps is not optional - it is essential”, Nykiel stressed.
According to estimates, gender pay and pension gaps cost the EU EUR 390 billion in 2023 due to lost earnings and lower public revenues. Closing the gender employment gap could boost GDP per capita by between 3.2% and 5.5% by 2050, while higher wages would encourage more women to enter and remain in the labour market.
“Europe cannot afford to waste women’s talent,” Nykiel added. “Pay and pension gaps are an economic inefficiency - they keep people out of work and weaken Europe’s ability to respond to demographic decline and skills shortages.”
The report places competitiveness and productivity at the heart of the debate, highlighting that women’s full economic participation is indispensable for Europe’s long-term prosperity.
At its January 2026 plenary session, the European Economic and Social Committee (EESC) adopted a resolution outlining the EU’s priorities for the 70th United Nations Commission on the Status of Women (UN CSW70). With a strong focus on access to justice, women’s participation in public life and the elimination of gender‑based violence, the EESC sets out a roadmap to strengthen women’s rights and reinforce democracy across Europe and beyond.
The resolution builds on the EESC’s longstanding engagement with global gender‑equality frameworks and its sustained cooperation with the European Union at the UN level. With democratic backsliding, harassment in digital and real life and structural discrimination affecting women and girls in every region of the world, the Committee calls for a renewed commitment to advancing women’s rights in all their diversity and for placing access to justice at the centre of this work.
The Joint Platform of Women’s Movements and Organizations in Rojava and North and East Syria announced the launch of a national and international campaign demanding the safeguarding of women’s rights in a new Syria and emphasizing women’s active participation in drafting the anticipated constitution.
The announcement came during a statement delivered today, Wednesday, at the 12 March Stadium in the city of Qamishlo, attended by dozens of activists and members of women’s organizations, alongside intellectuals, politicians, and rights advocates.
Twenty-nine women’s movements, organizations, unions, and political parties signed the statement, coinciding with the approaching International Women’s Day on March 8 each year. The statement was read in three languages: the Kurdish version by Kongra Star spokesperson Rihan Loqo, the Arabic version by Mona Youssef, an administrator in the Syrian Women’s Council, and the Syriac version by Samira Gawriah Hanna, a member of the Syriac Women’s Union Party.
This brief provides an overview of how the UN system has advanced global efforts to prevent and respond to violence against women and girls (VAWG) over the past five years. Drawing from the contributions of 36 UN entities and mechanisms for the Inventory of United Nations activities to end violence against women and girls, the brief highlights collective progress achieved through coordinated action, joint programming and partnerships with governments, civil society and women’s rights organizations. The brief documents the UN system’s role in advancing global norms and standards, with notable developments in violence in the work environment, technology-facilitated violence, conflict-related sexual violence and harmful practices. It showcases how coordination mechanisms and flagship joint initiatives—such as the spotlight initiative, the UN Trust Fund to End Violence Against Women and other inter-agency programmes—have mobilized resources, strengthened laws and policies, expanded access to survivor-centered services, scaled up prevention efforts and improved data and evidence. At the same time, the brief underscores persistent gaps, including uneven implementation of laws, limited financing, fragmented prevention efforts, data challenges and growing backlash against gender equality. It emphasizes the central role of women’s rights organizations and feminist movements in driving sustainable change. Looking ahead to 2030, the brief calls for the UN system to deepen coordination, strengthen accountability, invest in evidence-based interventions at scale and reinforce locally led, whole-of-society approaches to end VAWG.
It’s been six months since the latest spark ignited mass protests in Iran — the death of 22-year-old Kurdish-Iranian Mahsa (Jina) Amini in morality police custody after she was arrested for allegedly failing to wear her hijab properly.
The outrage over her killing resulted in women-led protests. Their slogan “woman, life, freedom,” originally a Kurdish manifesto, has helped fuel the Iranian protesters’ demands for radical change.
Read more: Iranian women keep up the pressure for real change – but will broad public support continue?
The perseverance, bravery and determination of the Iranian protesters, particularly women and girls, have been heroic. Despite risks to their lives and freedoms due to a brutal government crackdown, many remain active in publicly articulating their grievances in a variety of ways.
In recent months, while some street presence has continued in Iran — for example, in response to the poisonings of schoolgirls in cities across the country — protesters are also organizing strikes, sit-ins, boycotts and publicizing their demands in the form of manifestos, charters and bills of rights.
In fact, a key distinguishing factor between the recent protests and the previous ones is that Iranians have been forming coalitions to advocate for important structural and institutional changes in support of equality, human rights, democracy and freedom.
Over the past two decades, the structures of social communication and public discourse have undergone profound transformations. The digital sphere has become a contested arena and a central space where identities are produced and symbolic and social meanings are shaped. It has also become a place where new subcultures emerge and existing hierarchies are often reinforced. Within this landscape, feminist and political movements have created counter-public spheres that enabled women and marginalized groups to break the monopoly of power over meaning, expose patriarchal violence, and build transnational networks of solidarity.
Such networks helped dismantle the ideological structures that sustained violence and victim-blaming for decades. The broader shifts in societal values unfolded alongside a surge of revolutionary consciousness across the Global South, which exposed the colonial and capitalist structures underpinning political and social life. This awakening was met, however, with intensified surveillance, repression, and the mobilization of power to resist change.
Digital surveillance cannot be understood simply as the use of technology by those in power. It reflects the transformation of the digital sphere itself into a disciplinary apparatus that reproduces colonial and neo-fascist modes of control. Once absorbed into a capitalist ownership structure monopolized by transnational corporations, the internet ceased to be a neutral space for knowledge or communication. It became an infrastructure of domination, where data and algorithms are deployed to sort, control, and exclude.
Algorithmic architectures reinforce hierarchies of language, gender, race, and class. Through mechanisms of digital moderation that reflect the logic of white, masculine, and capitalist privilege, feminist and anti-authoritarian content is systematically excluded. In this way, algorithms have become ideological tools that silence and erase voices deviating from the dominant norms enforced by structures of power.
Despite the progress made during decades of work by women’s rights organizations and democratic institutions, gender equality is still a long way off. There is a growing understanding that gender equality will only be achieved when men and women work together towards full gender equality and equal respect for the rights of all individuals and groups.
This paper presents nine policy and good practice recommendations to support diverse audiences in their work to include men in building a more gender-equal, peaceful, prosperous and democratic world.
Authors: Jennifer Klein, Rachel Vogelstein, and Lauren Hoffman
This year marks the thirtieth anniversary of the 1995 United Nations (UN) Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, a watershed moment in the fight for women’s rights, where 189 nations adopted an ambitious Platform for Action to achieve the full and equal participation of women and girls. While the past three decades have produced important gains, this work remains unfinished, and new challenges threaten to reverse progress for women and girls. This report, produced by the Women’s Initiative at Columbia's Institute of Global Politics and GWL Voices, provides an actionable roadmap to advance the full and equal participation of women and girls in the twenty-first century—including in the areas of democracy and human rights, technology, economic participation, and conflict and climate. The report also proposes key levers designed to accelerate the pace of change, including innovative financing, institutional leadership and reform, coalition building, and improved data and research. It concludes with a call to accelerate action towards fulfilling the Beijing Platform and realizing the promise of women’s human rights once and for all.
A new report from the Environmental Voter Project (EVP), shared first with The 19th, finds that far more women than men are listing climate and environmental issues as their top priority in voting.
The nonpartisan nonprofit, which focuses on tailoring get out the vote efforts to low-propensity voters who they’ve identified as likely to list climate and environmental issues as a top priority, found that women far outpace men on the issue. Overall 62 percent of these so-called climate voters are women, compared to 37 percent of men. The gender gap is largest among young people, Black and Indigenous voters.
The nonprofit identifies these voters through a predictive model built based on surveys it conducts among registered voters. It defines a climate voter as someone with at least an 85 percent likelihood of listing climate change or the environment as their number one priority.
“At a time when other political gender gaps, such as [presidential] vote choice gender gaps, are staying relatively stable, there’s something unique going on with gender and public opinion about climate change,” said Nathaniel Stinnett, founder of the organization.
Read here the full article published by The 19th News on 14 April 2025.
Image by The 19th News
As smoke from wildfires in Canada smothered New York City in a polluted haze in June 2023, some worried patients called the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Columbia University Irving Medical Center asking if it was safe to come in for their appointments. Was the outside air so unhealthy that they should postpone their visits? Pregnant women expressed concern about how the heightened pollution might affect them and their fetuses. If they did venture outside for any reason, what masks should they wear?
The doctors understood the fears but did not want women to postpone visits, especially if the patients were pregnant. “If people cancel their appointments during pregnancy, it can put them and their baby at risk of health problems,” says Blair Wylie, MD, an obstetrician who had joined Columbia eight months prior to lead its new Collaborative for Women’s Environmental Health.
The department changed some appointments to virtual.
Wildfire smoke was not the environmental risk that Wylie expected to address when she moved to New York after leading maternal-fetal medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. “I was thinking of heat waves. I was thinking of floods,” she says.
Read here the full article published by the Association of American Medical Colleges on 6 June 2024.
Image by the Association of American Medical Colleges