World Conference on Women; Action for Equality in Pakistan

Around 25 years ago, the fourth world conference on women was held in Beijing wherein the thousands of delegates had landed. It was the largest ever international gathering to discuss cum advance women’s equality and their human rights as well.
The aim of the conference was to get a strong commitment from leaders of the world on the strategies to advance and upgrade women’s rights. Nearly a month, the Beijing Platform for Action was adopted by 189 countries in the unanimous manner to ring up the curtain to endorse women’s equality and empowerment on which nation states agreed they would work together.
The concluding text of the Beijing Platform for Action (BPA) secured the significant commitments to deal with women’s inequality, and it was publicized as a great triumph in receiving the unanimity on such possibly conflict-ridden issues as the rights capable of reproduction, women and land ownership in conflict resolution. The platform also had added that the violence against women is not a “domestic” issue to be dealt with at the family level, but it is rather a globally intractable phenomenon.
In a report, UN Women, the United Nations body devoted to women empowerment and gender equality, said progress since Beijing has been not smooth, and warned gender equality lags until now. Moreover, it added that the progress on the access for women to paid work has ground down to a surcease for donkeys’ years. This goes through the ceiling when people begin talking the hind leg off a donkey.
The report brought down the curtain on the final determination for women keep on shouldering the bulk of domestic work and unpaid care, howbeit one in five women (18 per cent) still faces violence from her intimate partners every year. New technologies, nowadays, ignite the new forms of violence, such as cyber-bullying, against which the policy solutions are mostly absent. Around 32 million girls are still out of schools, and men counterparts, hitherto, are in the command of three-quarters of parliamentary seats across the globe. This is how largely the women inequality prevails at this juncture.
Today over 30,000 girls get married every day before they reach the age of 18 years; that proportion stands roughly as one girl gets married in every two seconds.
There are still more than 600 million women alive today who are married in their early ages, struggling on a variety of social cum health problems.
Possibly the greatest triumph of the Beijing conference was to advance and promote women’s human rights by means of many-sided diplomacy. With over 170 nation states partaking, there was, to my surprise, little animosity and larger collaboration to get the still inspiring and world-shattering Beijing Platform for Action. This is the potential challenge in a world wherein the multilateral leadership has seriously been destabilized.
One stated goal of the conference was to achieve women empowerment. Those empowered by conference carry now a torch to enlighten the realization of the radical freedom of all women and their guarded rights. With this reference, India has also given her word, though, to increase the rate of investment in education with especial focus on the girls and women as well, Pakistan still lags behind in this sprint.
Although, the said conference was held for the fourth time throughout the span of two and a half decade to set the strategic goals to achieve gender equality in 12 different critical areas, but all these areas are still put to the torch.
A renewed global commitment is needed where State itself, NGOs, individuals, and agencies should cooperate to add force to endeavors to achieve the promise of Beijing that is common here in the country — Pakistan.