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This year’s theme for International Day of the Girl Child (IDGC) is Empowering Adolescent Girls: Ending the Cycle of Violence. While ending gender-based violence is a vitally important issue, the UN missed the opportunity entirely to tackle the root causes that allow violence to be a cycle. In its communication materials around the girl child, the UN states: “Investing in girls is the right andsmart thing to do.”

Achievements and challenges of the MDGs aside, we need to make the case for robust and transformatory change in the Post-2015 Development Agenda also noting that the international community is different - there are new and powerful actors in the room, with private sector and business having a bigger role than before.

The North-South Institute’s Post-2015 Tracking Tool is an interactive aggregator of proposals on the post-2015 development agenda. Organized thematically, the tool helps tracking the goals, targets, and indicators that are being proposed to replace the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and support and monitor development progress beyond 2015. The Gender Equality section provides updated info on the proposals to date including external resources for each indicator

Below are the talking points delivered by AWIDer Nerea Craviotto during the event "Human rights for all in sustainable development: Is the post-2015 process really delivering?", co-organized by Amnesty International, the Center for Economic and Social Rights and AWID on 11 September 2014.  

AWID recently spoke with a representative from the Myanmar/Burma Women’s Network and the Women’s League of Burma about the proposed ‘Law On the Protection of Race and Religion’.

At the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean conference (ECLAC) Regional Conference on Population and Development in Montevideo, Uruguay in August 2013, AFM launched an innovative and engaging campaign calling on passersby to "Talk to God" without intermediaries, via a telephone booth.

Paving the Road for Freedom and Equality is a publication of the Mesoamerican Women Human Rights Defenders Inititative that reflects the main achievements, lessons and experiences of the Mesoamerican Women Human Rights Defenders Initiative (IMD) and how it has contributed to the protection of women defenders in Mesoamerica—a region comprised of Mexico and Central America.

Development actors worldwide accept that advancing women’s rights and gender equality is not only a desirable goal, but a cornerstone of any successful sustainable development framework. Women and girls are in the public eye and recognised as key agents in development as never before. By Ana Abelenda, Association for Women’s Rights in Development

CSW58 AGREED CONCLUSIONS This year’s negotiations at the CSW were hotly contested, as usual, and very important because of the new development framework that is being put forward to replace the MDGs when they expire in 2015. As such, women’s rights advocates, organisations and movements worked extremely hard to retain existing language and tried to push forward language so that the Agreed Conclusions contained clear commitments for gender equality and women’s human rights.

Hassan Rouhani has now passed the six-month mark as Iran’s President, after his landslide victory in summer 2013 marked the end of the 8-year rule of Ahmedinejad. His predecessor presided over a period widely considered to be among the most challenging for women’s rights activists in the history of the Islamic Republic. Sussan Tahmsebi, an Iranian-American activist and co-founder of the International Civil Society Action Network (ICAN) reflects on expectations of, and concerns about, Rouhani after his first six months in office.