The Istanbul Regional Hub (IRH) is UNDP’s main knowledge and advisory hub for the countries serviced by UNDP’s Regional Bureau for Europe and CIS (RBEC). The Gender Equality Team at the UNDP IRH supports UNDP Country Offices in 18 countries and territories in the Europe and Central Asia region with a range of advisory services to advance gender equality and women’s empowerment. Specifically, IRH Gender Equality Team works to deliver opportunities and improve skills for women’s economic empowerment, especially in the future world of work, focusing on the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) sectors; address and prevent violence and all forms of discrimination against women and girls; support Country Offices to close gender gaps and deliver gender equality results aligned with the SDGs as part of their national programs, and monitors the gender-differentiated impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic; support UNDP Country Offices and interested partners to attain the Gender Equality Seal, a UNDP institutional certification programme that promotes gender equality both as a development goal and an integral part of organizational functioning. The Gender Equality Seal programme for RBEC aims to empower managers and accelerate changes needed to support national gender equality goals combining quality assurance with learning and capacity building of staffs with 14 participating offices for the year 2021-2023.
IRH Gender Equality Team also supports the design and implementation of regional and sub-regional initiatives to promote gender equality and women’s empowerment, and tracks and presents the results achieved by UNDP programmes and initiatives in the region in advancing gender equality and women’s empowerment. Among others, STEM4ALL is a regional digital platform launched by IRH Gender Equality Team in March 2021 and this online platform has catalyzed widespread interest in knowledge exchange, community building and cross-sector collaboration to overcome systematic gender barriers, break stereotypes, and access networks and resources to advance girls and women in STEM education and professional careers.
UNDP also recognizes the role women play in empowering other women as parliamentary representatives, supporting the emergence of gender-sensitive parliaments, and adopting gender-responsive policy and legislative frameworks. In 2020, the IRH Gender Equality and Communications teams launched an interactive online platform, #Equal Future. The platform allows users to actively observe the progress on women’s political participation in 57 countries and territories around the world since the 1995 Beijing conference. By doing this, the platform contributes to informing the audience, researchers and policymakers about recent changes in women’s representation in parliament, as well as providing an overview of the evolution in the past 27 years, and developing forecasts and showcasing stories of women parliamentarians from the region. The platform has been updated in 2021 and 2022 with new data, key events and stories of women parliamentarians.
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