UN Women Executive Director Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka visited Namibia last week to attend the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) Focal Points Network meeting being held in Windhoek.
The two-day meeting brought together Women, Peace and Security Focal Points from the Member States, sub-regional and regional organizations, civil society experts and young women leaders from more than 40 countries. Participants engaged in in-depth discussions on how to increase women’s leadership and participation in all areas of peace and security, strategies to strengthen implementation of National Action Plans on WPS, address the issue of disarmament and small arms and light weapons, and the important role of young women in advancing the women, peace and security agenda. This is the first meeting of the Network in Africa.
The Network serves as a cross-regional forum for the Member States, regional organizations and civil society to share experiences and best practices to advance implementation on all UN Security Council resolutions on women, peace and security and to improve coordination of funding and assistance programmes. Canada and Uruguay will co-chair the Network in 2020, and UN Women serves as the Secretariat of the Network.
On the 11th of April, the Executive Director delivered a Call to Action at the WPS Focal Points Network meeting to build momentum towards the 20th anniversary in 2020 of UN Security Council resolution 1325 (2000) and to urge participants to act and make commitments that amplify the role of women in conflict prevention and peacebuilding. Between 1990 and 2017, women constituted only 2 per cent of mediators, 8 per cent of negotiators, and 5 per cent of witnesses and signatories in all major peace process. Several recent high-profile peace talks for Yemen (held in Stockholm), for Libya (held in Palermo) and for Afghanistan (with the Taliban) have had either no or minimal participation of women.
Source: UN Women
