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