'South-South Coop to promote women's prog'

New Delhi, Oct 13: Minister for Women and Child Development Renuka Chowdhury today called for cooperation among developing countries to facilitate efforts, and joint collaboration for promoting strategies and programmes for development of women.

Inaugurating a two-day meeting of women's forum of Indo-Brazil and South Africa (IBSA) here, Ms Chowdhury said while women applauded achievements and advancements towards gender equality, entry into the mainstream economy and other critical institutional linkages have not met their expectations.

Centre to this, was the people to people contact that was built on sharing and learning from successful practices in IBSA countries.

She stressed the need for consolidation of IBSA initiatives and collaboration at regional level, for promoting women development and welfare.

The IBSA women's forum was being attended by the ministerial level delegations from Brazil and South Africa, diplomats, parliamentarians and UN representatives. The deliberations of the women's forum over the next two days would focus on the theme 'Strengthening the women's movement for an equitable society'. The meeting would also share best practices and finalise the recommendations to be presented at the summit meeting here on October 15.

To strengthen the joint initiatives and cooperation in identified programmatic areas, a Memorandum of Understanding was also proposed to be signed between the three countries during the summit meeting.

Cooperation under this MoU was proposed to be implemented through exchange of visits, sharing of information, civil society partnerships and human resource development and training.

The IBSA women's forum was launched in October last year as an addition to the business, academic and parliamentary forums of IBSA, to facilitate joint effort and collaboration of the three countries in the field of women's development. Over the last one year, the women's forum has firmly established the common areas for action in promoting strategies for gender equality and accelerated poverty eradication.

The programmatic areas identified were relevant to all the three countries. These include women and micro-finance, skills development and capacity building, gender budgeting, violence against women, civil-society partnerships, macro-economic policy and research and cooperation at multilateral forums.

UNI