All eyes on Kigali: Why Rwanda is hosting the world’s largest women conference

Author: Josephine Kalembe

• 2023-07-17 05:10:00

Thousands of delegates from all over the world are meeting in Rwanda’s capital Kigali for Women Deliver Conference 2023. The world's largest conference on gender equality, health, rights, and wellbeing of girls and women starts July 17 and ends on July 20.

More than 6,000 people are attending in person and an estimated 200,000 others, virtually through a hybrid convening model, to enhance the collective power of diverse gender equality advocates around the world including championing the leadership of grassroots advocates, connecting advocates with decision-makers, and sharing key advocacy strategies. The conference is a platform to discuss the challenges women still face and come up with tangible solutions.

Besides it’s credible peace and security credentials, post-genocide Rwanda’s strong commitment to gender equality and girls’ and women’s health and rights made it an appropriate choice for hosting WD2023.

Hosting the conference is an honor for Rwanda.

 It affirms that the ongoing efforts around gender equality by the government of Rwanda are gaining the desired traction.

The east African country made significant progress in gender equality in the past three decades. The Global Gender Gap Report 2023 ranked Rwanda second in Sub-Saharan Africa and the 12th globally, in closing the gender gap.

Rwanda is the first country in the world with a female majority in parliament with 61.25 per cent of seats in the national parliament held by women, way above the global average of 26.4 per cent.

In June 2022 when the WD2023 was announced to happen in Kigali, Women Deliver’s outgoing CEO, Kathleen Sherwin explained that Rwanda had a lot of policy advancement around gender equality over, particularly, the last decade.

She said: “We work on areas of gender equality like Universal Health Coverage (UHC), and Rwanda has near UHC. We talk a lot about building back from the pandemic in the gender lens that Rwanda has done really well in terms of the rate of Covid-19 and their response to the recovery program.

“We talk about political leadership and women being at the leadership table, and 60 percent of the Rwandan Government has female leaders. And we know Rwanda is a leader in the technology coalition under the Generation Equality Forum.”

Rwanda’s Minister of Gender and Family Promotion, Jeannette Bayisenge, who is also Chair of the WD2023 Host Country Committee, said: “We believe that gender equality will only be achieved once all people have equal access to power, dignity, justice, rights, health, and opportunities that will enable them to network, develop skills, share knowledge, access funding opportunities, and participate in conversations that contribute to the global agenda setting on gender equality.”

The President and CEO of Women Deliver, Dr Maliha Khan, said that outcomes of WD2023 will be making sure that they are catalysing collective action.

“Individually, organisations, people, or even governments or ministries can’t make change themselves, so you have to bring together a number of different people from different sectors, government and civil society, all sorts of different actors and you have to put them into a space where they are actually talking to each other rather than talking at each other, which is often what happens,” Khan said.

Founded in 2007, Women Deliver previously convened five conferences in London, Washington DC, Kuala Lumpur, Denmark, and Vancouver. The sixth conference, in Kigali, is the first in Africa.

Key guests and speakers include Rwandan Rwanda President Paul Kagame and his Senegalese counterpart Macky Sall. The First lady of Rwanda, Jeannette Kagame, and her Namibian counterpart, Monica Geingos, will speak at the event as well.