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Commission on the Status of Women (CSW63)
11-22 March 2019
United Nations HQ, New York (USA)
The sixty-third session of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW63) will take place at the UN HQ, New York from 11 to 22 March 2019. The priority theme for this year is social protection systems, access to public services and sustainable infrastructure for gender equality and the empowerment of women and girls.
Women’s access to social protection schemes is often a key strategy for empowering women and helping low-income families (in particular female-headed households) rise out of poverty. When working on gender through social protection, the nutritional impact of social protection mechanisms can be enhanced by facilitating access to diverse and nutritious foods (e.g. fresh food vouchers, or access to productive assets to produce diverse foods), by improving access to health services (e.g. conditional cash transfers tied to ante-natal care visits or participation in health insurance schemes), and associating nutrition education to the social protection program.
The following is a sampling of side events organized by UNSCN members that work to link nutrition with the 2019 theme:
- 11 March, 3:00-4:15pm (Conference Room A): Advancing Social Entrepreneurship as a Women Economic Empowerment Enabler is organised by Albania, Italy, Greece and UN Women to promote the exchange of knowledge on the application of social entrepreneurship to enable women economic empowerment.
- 12 March, 10:00-11:15am (Conference Room 1): Empowering Girls Through Social Protection will be a chance to learn how programmes can better address life course vulnerabilities and break inter-generational cycles of poverty. This event is hosted by the U.K. and Northern Ireland, UNICEF and the GAGE consortium.
- 12 March, 10:00-11:15am (Conference Room D):Empowering Rural Women And Girls: Access To Education, Health And Social Services is an effort on behalf of The Republic of Malawi, in collaboration with UN-Women, to showcase how social protection instruments can be used as tools for achieving gender equality and the empowerment of rural women and girls.
- 12 March, 10:00-11:15am (Conference Room 11): Health For All Through Women's Human Rights: Ensuring Universal Health Coverage & Social Protection is organized by the World Health Organization (WHO) to address the fact that at least half of the world's populations still do not have full coverage of essential health services.
- 12 March, 6:30-7:45pm (Conference Room 11): Eye On The Target - Up Front And Personal With The World's Poorest People will look at the interactions between social protection, rural transformation and inclusiveness through a selected number of IFAD-supported projects.
- 13 March, 6:30-7:45pm (Conference Room 11): How Can Social Protection Enhance Gender Equality And The Empowerment Of Rural Women And Girls?, organized by FAO, aims to raise awareness on how rural women’s participation in social assistance schemes, such as cash transfers and public works programmes, enable women to earn wages, accumulate assets and cope with shocks.
- 14 March, 6:30-7:45pm (Conference Room 11): Rural Women's Empowerment For Food Security And Nutrition For All: Evidence From Joint Un Work will present new evidence on the joint work of FAO, IFAD, WFP and UN Women to eliminate hunger and malnutrition through the provision of a layered, integrated approach to women’s economic empowerment.
- 15 March, 12:30-2:00pm (Second floor of the Church Center for the United Nations): Subsistence Farming and Multisector Support for Social Protection of Nutrition is being organised by the NGO Health Committee in collaboration with Armenian Relief Society.
- 19 March, 10:00-11:15am (Conference Room 12): Social Protection Systems For Gender Equality: Achieving UHC To Empower Women And Girls And Reduce The Burden Of NCDs is an effort on by the WHO, NCD Alliance and Women & NCDs Taskforce.
The organization of work for CSW63, the official documents, and information about side events and activities organized outside the formal programme of the session are available online.
