Women Deliver 2019 - No gender equity without equitable access to education
Officially opened by Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau yesterday in Vancouver, Women Deliver is a global summit described as “the world’s largest conference on gender equality and the health, rights, and well-being of girls and women.”
From 3-6 June 2019, the summit will bring together around 7,000 delegates from 160 countries under the banner “power, progress, change”. Dolores Dickson, CAMFED Executive Director – Canada & Global Programs, will be speaking at the event, joining several strategic partners, and bringing evidence from our programs to shine a spotlight on the urgent need to advance girls’ education across the globe.
The girls and young women we work with are exceptional, but they are not exceptions. We stand proud of this generation of girls and young women and know, from experience, that if they have the educational opportunities they aspire to, the sky is just the beginning. Creating equitable access to education is the starting point for gender equity.
Dolores Dickson
Gender equity, just like all of the other global sustainable development goals, can only be achieved through equitable access to quality education across the world. CAMFED, a founding member of the United Nations Girls’ Education Initiative (UNGEI), will be joining the Global Partnership for Education, Malala Fund, Plan International, UNESCO and UNGEI to highlight the power of education.
A series of events in The Education Hub, hosted within the conference’s Fueling Station, will bring together speakers from a variety of sectors to discuss how “Girls + Education = Power. Progress. Change.”
Dolores Dickson, joined in Vancouver by Sandra Spence, Director for Global Partnerships at CAMFED USA, will be speaking on a panel on Wednesday, 5 June at 12:30 PST (3:30 PM EST, 8:30 PM BST) entitled National policy to community action: Lessons learned in advancing girls’ education. Fellow panelists include Angela Nakafeero, Gender Technical Adviser at the Ministry of Education and Sports in Uganda, and Rita Bissoonauth from the AU Center for Women and Girls’ Education.
Partners Nora Fyles, Head of the UNGEI Secretariat, and Pauline Rose, Director of the Research for Equitable Access and Learning (REAL) Centre, Cambridge University, will discuss Political leadership for girls’ education: What will it take? immediately after Dolores’ session at 13:15 Pacific time.
The young women in CAMFED’s alumnae network, CAMA, are now spearheading our programs in sub-Saharan Africa, supporting the most vulnerable girls within government school systems to go to school, stay in school, succeed, and become leaders and change makers in their communities, changing the status quo for women for good.
CAMFED Patron Julia Gillard, Board Chair of the Global Partnership for Education, will be sharing her deep expertise in Tuesday’s Real Talk session at 16:30, and will join the panel Road from Dakar at 15:30 on Wednesday 5 June. See the full Education Hub Programme here.
Those who can’t be there in person can follow the conference on Twitter using #WD2019 and #ThePowerof, and view archive sessions on the Women Deliver Virtual Conference pages.