Union for the Mediterranean celebrates International Women’s Day
Barcelona, 8 March, 2014. On the occasion of the International Women’s Day, the Union for the Mediterranean joins the international community in congratulating and supporting all women around the world. We express our particular and utmost admiration and respect for the women of the Euro-Mediterranean region, who have stood at the forefront of development, respect and freedom. Women represent an enormous wealth of knowledge, wisdom, expertise and work force that still needs to be fully acknowledged and supported. The Union for the Mediterranean stands ready to contribute to these strategic global goals by fostering a stronger participation of women from the Euro-Mediterranean region in the social, cultural, political and economic development and progress of their societies.
The women empowerment agenda in the Euro-Mediterranean recently received a strong support from the region’s leaders when the Third Union for the Mediterranean Ministerial Declaration on Strengthening the Role of Women in Society was endorsed by the 43 Member States in September 2013 in Paris, France. The Member States have highlighted the significant role the region’s women have played in the historic changes in the Southern Mediterranean and have encouraged further advancement of their role and contribution to the region’s overall socio-economic development. The Secretariat of the Union for the Mediterranean has engaged in project cooperation with a wide array of stakeholders, all fully committed to women empowerment and gender equality. It is in this spirit that a project conference Women’s Socio-Economic Empowerment: Projects for Progress is organised and hosted by the Union for the Mediterranean on the 26th and 27th of March in Barcelona, Spain. It will be an occasion to assess the major needs of the region’s women, discuss projects, initiatives and programmes for advancing women empowerment and facilitate funding for project implementation. Full information on the conference’s goals, agenda and logistics can be found here.
In our current work, the Union for the Mediterranean has supported the delivery of such important regional projects as Young Women as Job Creators, which provided more than 800 young women university students with concrete advice on private business creation. Its success has led to the project’s replication in additional countries during 2014 and 2015, with more students, more universities and a wider range of local partners supporting the project.
Skills for Success is another regional project aimed at helping young women access specific vocation training aimed at their successful entry into local labour markets.
The project Developing Women Empowerment will start its implementation during 2014 by the newly established Foundation for the Women of the Euro-Mediterranean. It aims at enabling actors striving for gender equality to work together for achieving women’s empowerment in the Euro-Mediterranean region through, inter alia, an interactive internet platform available in English, French and Arabic.
CALL FOR PROJECT PROPOSALS IN THE FIELD OF GENDER AFFAIRS
All interested stakeholders in establishing project cooperation with the Union for the Mediterranean are invited to submit concrete project proposals for appraisal, which will be assessed following the Union for the Mediterranean project criteria and brought to the attention of the conference’s participants, namely possible donors and project partners. All the information on how to submit project proposals to the UfM Secretariat, the general project criteria and the necessary templates can be found here:
