ONE UN - Beyond shelter adequate, safe, resilient housing for gender equality and women's empowerment in different housing contexts (WUF13)

Can you hear me well now? Thank you all for being here.
We just have a few people still trickling in.
Let me take that opportunity to invite you to get a headset.
It's never a bad idea to have one.
I think our speakers are mostly in English, but we do have room at the end for some questions, in which case people might express themselves as they feel the most comfortable.
We do have translation in all the UN official languages and in Azerbijani.
If you do need a headset, please, they're just at the back of the room right here.
With that, I think we can go ahead and get started.
Please feel free to move to the front of the room as well.
Excellency' distinguished guests, partners, colleagues, friends, allies in the movement.
My name is Katherine Travers.
I work as a policy specialist in the Endian Violence Against Women Section, and I'm based in our New York headquarters.
It gives me great pleasure to officially welcome you all to our side event today entitled Beyond Shelter, adequate, Safe, and Resilient Housing for Gender Equality and Women's Empowerment in Different Housing context.
I'd also like to thank you in Habitat and the Global Coalition on Safe Cities for co convening this session with us.
We are going to begin the session today with some opening remarks.
To kick us off, I have the pleasure of inviting Kari Ishikawa, who's a country representative in Georgia and liaison for the South Caucuses of UN Women to deliver framing remarks, which will include an important commemoration milestone for UN Women.
Thank you.
Thank you very much, Catherine, dear colleagues, Excellency friends.
First of all, I'd like to express our sincere appreciation to you and Habitat.
And the global coalition of Safe cities and their partnerships and convening this session with the UN Woman.
This global event is taking place during a 15th year anniversary of UN Safe cities and safe public spaces Global Initiative, which was referred by Kathleen earlier.
It's the flagship program that UN Woman is rolling out throughout the country.
As you know, UN woman celebrated our 15th anniversary last year.
It's really from the foundation of the UN woman, the program is there.
What began as a journey in five City in 2011, Delhi, Cairo, Port Moresby, Quito, and Kigari has grown to more than 70 cities in 36 countries with a comprehensive multi stakeholder programs.
Safe city and safe public spaces Global Initiative seeks to address one of the persistent challenges women and girls face in being able to benefit from and contribute to sustainable urban development, a challenge that is often overlooked in urban policies and planning, which is sexual harassment and other forms of sexual violence against women and girls.
Over the past 15 years, the global initiative has worked to generate data and evidence to inform development, implementation, assessment, and integrated approaches to women and girls safety and demonstrated the result.
It has addressed knowledge gaps and sexual harassment in public spaces using participatory data collection methodologies to ensure that the local interventions was informed, the local evidence It has contributed to introducing strengthening a law and policies, sexual harassment in public spaces in more than 25 countries, including Guatemala, Philippines, and Egypt through investment in urban transportation planning that take account of the needs of women and girls, men and boys, public space has been designed to develop with women's strong participation supported by the package of tools tailored to the context, resources, and technical packages.
From increased lightning to the clear walking path to public toilets for women in markets to buses that consider women's mobility patterns, that initiative have transformed how women's lives, experience their cities and community and have also increased women's economic empowerment.
This outcome can only be sustainable if they are supported by the transformation to social, cultural, institutional norms that values women's human rights, includes gender equality across the sectors, promote women's rights to live free of violence.
This also includes prevention strategies, includes multi pronged strategy to engage men and boys.
Our partners across the share safe city and safe public spaces for women and girls is not a project.
It is a vision, but the city can be for all and achieving this vision require multi year investment and a strong political will from the top and of course, the grassroots movement participation along with other civil society partners from the bottom up.
We know that this challenge is possible to address.
Evaluation concluded in our founding city program have demonstrated a safe city intervention resulted in the reduction of prevalence of sexual harassment in public transport in the city of Quito, improved sense of safety, hygiene, and the comfort among women and girls in marketplaces in Port Moresby, strengthen support of survivors violence, and increase autonomous mobility of women in Cairo.
This week, we are exploring another dimension, housing as a part of integrated approach to safe and resilient cities and communities.
We know that many women face significant housing challenges including limited access to adequate housing, discriminatory law restricting ownership and inheritance, exposure to violence that can lead to homelessness, insecurity tenure, for survival of violence, safe, affordable housing is a critical need.
Through this session today, we're exploring what is adequate, safe, resilient housing for gender equality, women's empowerment, can be in a different housing context.
Housing needs is not homogeneous for all women and girls.
The specific context matters greatly.
So does the availability of supporting services.
Women living in a rural area, working in agriculture, for example, are deeply affected by climate change, which puts their both livelihood and housing at risk.
A woman's socioeconomic status greatly impacts her housing opinions, options, and many low income woman unable to purchase property, rely on the male family members for their housing needs.
For woman in a situation of intimate partner violence, lack of access to safe, affordable, adequate housing, alternative can make the women feel they have no choice but to stay in a violent partner.
Adequate housing shapes women's safety, women's socioeconomic opportunities.
In that sense, women housing needs extended beyond shelter and include broader elements of adequate housing, such as access to transportation, livelihood, and safe public spaces.
Bringing all this agenda together may seem ambitious, but it is necessary.
Let us recall that we are not standing from scratch.
Lather, we are building on the decades of grassroots mobilization at the local level, safe communities, we are building on the local government leadership to create women's voices in the local policymaking urban planning.
We are building on evidence and lesson learned from the program like Safe City and safe public spaces that demonstrate how international norms and standards, including CEDO Beijing platform action, New Urban Agenda and SDGs are being adopted for local contexts and implemented by and for women and girls in partnerships and multi stakeholders.
We must take these lessons to scale and point to the evidence generated a call for increased investment, gender responsive housing and urban policy, plan that work for all women's girls.
Thank you very much for your attention and I wish you a very productive session this afternoon.
Thank you also for young men participating, I'm looking forward to working together with men and boys.
Thank you.
Thank you so much for those framing remarks and for highlighting all that we have achieved together already.
I also want to take a moment to really acknowledge and thanks that this isn't possible alone.
It's really possible because of the partnerships that we have, because of the work that we're doing with grassroots women and women leaders and communities, with the support of our donors, with our partnership with local governments and government representatives at different levels and with other stakeholders.
That's what's made this 15 year journey possible, and we look forward to continuing this journey together.
I would now like to invite Tony Shea Fckton, who's Director of the UN Habitat New York Liaison Office in the Office of the Executive Director to deliver her opening framing remarks on behalf of UN Habitat.
You have the floor.
Thank you very much and good afternoon everyone, Excellencies, distinguished colleagues, partners, friends.
On behalf of UN Habitat, it is a pleasure for us to collaborate with UN Women and our partners from the Global Coalition on Safe cities to bring together this important issue that sits at the heart of the theme of or Wolf 13.
Today, we're not here simply discussing housing policy, we're discussing whether women and girls can live with dignity, safety, autonomy, and equal opportunity in cities and communities, shaping our collective future.
Now, behind every statistic is a woman whose daily reality reflects the failures of our systems.
As we heard previously from Kori, context matters.
I want you to picture this woman.
Living in an informal settlement on the edge of a growing city, she wakes before dawn to fetch water, travels long distances to work in the informal economy, and returns home after dark on unsafe transport routes.
The house that she lives in is not legally hers.
If her husband dies, leaves, or becomes abusive, she may lose the roof over her head entirely.
She carries the burden of unpaid care work, yet has little voice in the decisions shaping her community, her housing, or her city.
Now, this is not an isolated story.
It really reflects the reality of millions of women globally, and it exists because housing and urban policy are still too often designed without women at the center.
The leadership gap behind this reality is stark.
Again, I'll share some more statistics.
More than 50% of the global population is female.
This we know.
Women only hold around one quarter of seats in local governments globally.
And fewer than one in three national parliaments worldwide or parliamentarians rather, are women.
Less than 5% of city mayors are women.
And there's an estimated 1.05 billion women and girls who will reside in slums or informal settlements or experience inadequate housing by 2050.
Again, context matters.
In many cities, the people designing housing systems, transport, land policy, infrastructure still do not reflect the people most affected by them.
When women are excluded from leadership and decision making, cities and housing systems fail to respond to women's realities or safety needs and care responsibilities.
This is why this issue is before us today, not only about shelter.
It is about power, participation, safety, and equality.
Now I want to leave you with three key messages.
First, Adequate housing is the foundation upon which women build economic security, independence, and opportunity.
When women have secure housing and land tenure, they are more likely to access finance and credit, invest in businesses, improve their homes, and strengthen their economic participation.
Earlier this year at CSW, a message from Kenya deeply resonated.
It says that although women make up nearly 75% of the country's agricultural labor force, they own less than 5% of the land.
I hope that also resonates for you.
Now that's a stark reminder that land tenure and housing security are deeply connected to women's economic rights, financial inclusion, and long term resilience.
Second, exclusion from land ownership, formal employment, and equal access to social protection systematically push women into housing precarity.
So for many women and girls, those who are living in poverty, in informal settlements and affected by crisis or conflict, housing insecurity is not accidental, it is structural.
Therefore, we need solutions that address these issues at the outset.
My third message, women are leading solutions.
Across the world, grassroots women's organizations are driving slum upgrading, community land trust, saving led housing finance, and disaster recovery initiatives.
Women are already designing practical, scalable solutions for safer and more inclusive cities.
But these efforts remain underfunded and under recognized, and what is needed is that investment is representation, and importantly, the partnerships.
Let us be clear on what is required.
Gender issues must be at the starting point of our housing policy.
We've heard from legal reform, gender responsive financing, and importantly, better deggregated data to inform planning and decision making.
And it is equally critical that women have real leadership and decision making power in shaping their homes, their communities, and the cities of the future.
So I will close by sharing that the urban agenda is the global agenda, and women and girls who have safe, secure, and affordable housing, communities will become more resilient, cities will become more inclusive and societies will become more equal.
So on this note, I want to wish you all very good discussions today and certainly for us at UN Habitat, we're looking forward to the outcomes as we go to New York for the high level meeting on the midterm review of the new urban agenda.
Thank you.
Thank you so much for those excellent remarks and for reminding us that while these statistics are stark, behind every statistic is a woman.
It is her daily life and it is her reality.
And we know that when she makes change in her life, it has a multiplier effect across the different elements of it.
But the structural solutions need to be in place to support that to happen sustainably.
So please join me once again, everyone in thanking our opening speakers for sharing these important insights.
Thank.
I would now like to invite our panel presentation speakers to please join me up here on the stage.
We can start migrating up, please.
Thank you so much.
Thank you so much.
Thank you.
For this next part of our session this morning, we're going to have a question and answer dialogue with some really impressive speakers that we've gathered here today.
I would like to, first of all, welcome them to the session.
We are going to have Ga.
We are going to have Zakaria Olad, who is a municipal counselor with the City of Agadir in Morocco.
We have Maryam Majidova.
Maybe give a wave so people know who you are.
Thank you.
Who is Executive Director of Gender Hub from Azerbaijan.
We have Ann Wan jiro.
Little wave from Matari Legal Council and Human Rights advocacy in Kenya.
She's a member of the Wiro Commission, which is a member of the Global Coalition on Safe cities and also a member of the advisory group on gender issues of human habitats.
We have Maria Muna Yusuf, Hello, who is Founder and Executive Director of Association of Women's Sanctuary and Development from Ethiopia.
We also have Rajel Olivieri, professor of law from the University of Missouri in the US, who you will know is not on the panel with us, so she cannot waive.
She was unable to travel to join us here at the World Urban Forum due to a family commitments, but she has sent through some video remarks that we'll be very happy to share with you towards the end of the session.
Quick reminder for anyone who may be joined us a few minutes late.
If you need interpretation, we do have it available in the back of the room to facilitate your participation in the session today.
Let's get started.
Zaria, we are going to start with you.
Now we know that housing is a national priority in Morocco with an active affordable housing policy, but housing does not exist in isolation.
The streets, the pavements, the parks, public infrastructure all around it shape whether a neighborhood is livable, safe, and dignified, especially for women and girls.
As Vice President of Urban Planning and Smart City Commission and Agadir, can you please tell us what the housing situation is there from a gender perspective and what tools or approaches has your city used to bring a gender responsive lens to housing and the surrounding urban environment.
You're free to speak from there or come here.
It's really as you prefer.
Perfect.
Thank you, Catherine.
Good afternoon already, everyone.
With the jet like I have to think always twice, is it morning or afternoon.
I'm Zach from Agadir Morocco and Agadir is the city that you see here on the slide.
Beautiful city, I must say, probably because I was born and raised there that I think that it's so beautiful.
But I invite you all to visit.
Today's presentation is not only about what's nice and beautiful in Agadir, but also what's lacking in Agadir.
So on the left hand side of the slide, you can see that Agade is a city that wins wins awards.
We won the Shanghai Award for Sustainable Development which you inhabited EBRD Green City Sustainable Development Award.
We've organized the African Cup of Nations for Football this year and last year, 2025, 2026.
We are welcoming the World Cup in 2030.
So many, many things that are working really, really well.
The city is really beautiful between the Atlas Mountains and the ocean and to many people out there, everything is really nice and perfect.
However, in the same city, we have an issue with spatial equity.
It is limited, but it is there.
On the right hand side of the slide, you can see some of the foothill neighborhoods in the city that lack the very basic infrastructure or at least choose to like it, roads, green infrastructure, sanitation, and so on.
30% of the people that live there do not live in slums, but still it is informal, so they don't have proper documentation for their houses.
They lack pretty much all adequate public spaces.
There's almost no formal transportation and insufficient street lighting.
We didn't know what we didn't know, and that was the issue.
With all the ambition that you can have, if you don't know what's wrong, you can't tackle it.
We've joined hands with the UN women, Morocco, and we decided to build the instrument first.
We've deployed a socioeconomical study across those neighborhoods.
We touched 1,400 people.
We desegregated the data that we got by age and bisex and many things that I say this morning will relate to what you've heard from the opening speakers because deseggregation of the data is really important.
Otherwise, you don't really understand the reality of the field.
Then we use technology as well, and this is probably my geek side.
So we go located gender scorecards, but using citizen science.
The women from those neighborhoods were the one deploying that.
With focus groups, of course, led exclusively by women in each neighborhood.
The fact that it's a man today that presents this does not mean that it's men's playing.
It's really about all of us working towards a more inclusive society, men, women, and whatever gender we think we belong to or we assume we belong to.
You can't fix what you haven't measured and as long as we didn't measure that, we couldn't fix it.
In the photos that you see, you see some of the work that we've done and also some screenshots from that app.
Where females from those neighborhoods can evaluate the safety because we are part of the safe cities initiative of UN women.
With regards to street lighting, stray dogs, presence of people, mixity of people, is it men, women, children, and only men, et cetera The data revealed some very shocking numbers.
80% of the women there were excluded from paid employment, either it was working at home or not working at all, and Women that became the primary breadwinner got ten times more power in the household decision making, which is also important for a woman's voice to be heard.
In one very specific neighborhood, 100% of the women there were needs, not in education, training, employment, which is basically that they are excluded from the society and which means also that they are excluded from helping in the development of the society.
Of course, it was very limited.
It's one very small neighborhood, but still it is very shocking as a figure.
Um, infrastructure barriers are of course, economical barriers, where you don't have transportation, you don't have infrastructure, you're excluded from the society.
Here I'm focusing on the fact that our approach to housing is holistic.
So it's the neighborhood and the infrastructure, not the house itself only.
Unfortunately, the second word does not appear, so the program is called Tmn and the squares that you see there are Tiffinar letters.
So I'm amazir and those are Amazir letters, but apparently they're not on the laptop of the organization, which is okay.
We're very far from Morocco.
Um, so the approach was a programmatic response.
So in four blocks, what we've worked on with the UN women was a gender responsive urban planning, the socio economical study with gender analysis.
So to better understand what was the reality of the field, the gender observatory and digital scorecards, and technology is really a facilitator because it helps a lot deaggregate the data and locate the data to understand where exactly the issue is.
And then gender responsive budgeting, of course, to avoid that situation where we get to the field and we say, A, too bad we don't have enough money to make that situation, that infrastructure gender responsive.
If you pay a hand ahead as of the budgeting phase, then there's no excuse not to do that.
We've also noticed that it's really about five to 10% more budget to make everything gender responsive.
It does not cost a lot of money.
I So on the left hand side, again, what it was, and on the right hand side, real photos of what it is today with this approach.
So thanks to the study, to the scorecards, to the budgeting, the gender sensitive budgeting, we moved from what you see on the left to what you see on the right.
Those are the exact same neighborhoods.
So new roads, new street lighting, green fields, sports fields, Um, even decorative lighting.
Actually, it's becoming really a touristic area and people are thinking about having bed and breakfast there, hotels, resorts because it has that very, very local touch.
This has been done over two years.
It's not something that has been done over 20 years.
If we really want to solve the issues, we can solve them.
This has been also a model for us, just some prove of concept to prove that when we want and we use the right instruments, we can Maybe not to take too much time.
I will just bring also my researchers perspective to this.
I'm a PhD researcher at KU 11 in Belgium and maybe four propositions from the field.
It's more of an empirical approach.
Sal inequity is produced, not accidental and I'm happy that the word accidental has already been used in this afternoon session.
We should not just say it is there and that's the way it is.
Gender responsive housing also is not about adding a lens of gender, which I personally thought it was.
I thought, everything that we do we just put gender lenses and then we can solve those issues, but it's not exactly that.
We need to go back to the root cause analysis.
What is the exact spatial issue that created this problem.
Data platforms as governance instruments and the keyword here really is governance.
It's about governing everything that we do because we end up understanding the problem, understanding the solution that we need to implement, but the governance instrument is not there and so it never works.
It's really about how do we govern this and understanding that it's not to neutral.
Governance instruments will make some people visible and some people invisible, even amongst women.
A white rich woman is not a colored, poor women, even in the same society, the same city, et cetera.
This is really important.
Public value or social value must be named before it can be produced.
We need to understand what it is.
We need to thrive towards spatial equity and the word justice is really key here.
Catherine, by the way, you realize that I'm also answering some of the second question that you were supposed to ask, but then it's said and maybe something that's really close to my heart as well, it's about midsize cities in the global South, which we see as real governance laboratories because everything that we talk about or most of the things that we talk about are addressed towards big metropolis cities that have the capacity, that have the financial capacity, the intellectual capacity, and so on.
But most people in our world on our planet live in mid sized cities and the one size fits all would never work.
We cannot just copy paste everything that we do somewhere elsewhere, we need to customize things.
Midsize cities face different challenges Therefore need a different approach.
Women and females and girls of midsize cities also need their own specific approach.
This is why we see many female migrating from mid size cities to larger cities when they can melt down in the population.
We want our mid size cities which have a higher quality of life to also be suited for our women and girls.
Thank you.
Thank you so much, Zacria for sharing those insights and for illustrating also the change that you have had and managed to introduce in Morocco.
I think you're right that you anticipated the second question.
Maybe before we close on that, I would just say, is there any recommendation that you might have for other municipal governments who are looking to introduce a gender responsive approach to housing, but also to all of the infrastructure that surrounds it? Thanks.
Thank you, Catherine.
I think the first thing is to acknowledge that we have, especially as men, biases and blind spots.
We need to understand that we have blind spots, that there are things out there that we don't see and that we might not see, at least in the very short term.
Just acknowledge that it's there and that we are part of a patriarchal system and we need to work towards solving that.
I think acknowledging that is already a very, very good.
First step because it will prevent us from saying, it's all good.
We've done what we needed to do.
We will always know that there is more to do.
Then the second thing is that and especially again for midsize cities in the global South, I think it's very important to get closer to these international institution and multilateral agencies and it's a pity to see how everyone or most people are shooting towards the UN, that we need to break this down and so on.
I think these are real opportunities for our cities because the work we have is work we have achieved together with UN women and UN habitat and other agencies as well.
I think sharing ideas, and this is exactly what we are doing today will elevate all of us so that our women can thrive in our cities.
So I just bring this down to a very pragmatic approach.
Women are at least half of the society, if not more than that, so we could never, ever achieve a proper social and societal development without our women.
So we really need to work together and maybe this is my recommendation so that all together we work together.
Thank you.
Thank you, Zakaria.
Okay.
I'm going to turn now to Miriam.
Miriam, your organization has been doing a lot of work on climate change, including in the rural areas here in Azerbaijan.
We know that women are disproportionately affected by the climate crisis, which is affecting their livelihoods, their safety, and their housing.
Can you please tell us a bit more about the work that you've been doing at some of these intersections? Thank you, Catherine and thank you for giving the voice for local civil society organizations.
I represent Gender Hub.
This is a grassroots civil society organizations which works on preventing gender based violence and domestic violence in Azerbijan through capacity building, human rights education, men engagement in gender equality, digital and social media advocacy.
Of course, in recent years, they have been very active in intersection of climate change and gender.
After COP 29 has been hosted in Azerbijan, we figured out that there are so many gaps when it comes to women's participation and decision making processes regarding climate change adaptation and mitigation.
We have been working with rural women, with farmers, with women with disabilities, and we realized how much words are unseen, unsaid, and all the experiences that they go through might not be even in the part of the decision making table.
The first time Cop 29 organizing committee was approved, there was no women on board.
And then we also as an organization, we did the advocacy, and we were invited to be part of the CP 29 organizing committee, but the idea was not to personally be there, but then they took it personally.
We were part of the CP 29 organizing committee and we used this space to showcase the gender issues, to use as many side events as possible.
During COP, you know that there is blue zones and a lot of people cannot access blue zones.
We went outside of Baku.
We went to Lairan to Genja to talk to young people, to women there, to explain to them that green skills is part of our daily life, but we just don't know how to name it because it's not an education system, it's not anywhere in the household.
And then we saw that young people there mentioned that, we didn't know that we could have actually an impact in climate change adaptation and mitigation.
We didn't know it's as simple and it starts from us, because for them, climate change is only on the news and something that's happening in Australia or Canada or somewhere that Azerbijan is not part of.
So, We try to narrow it down to population, especially vulnerable population that look, it impacts you and you as well as leaders of what you can shape and what you can change even in your household.
Then when we talk to women, farmers women, they mentioned that they don't even look at weather forecasts sometimes.
They don't know how to take into consideration while using their agricultural business.
We realized, Oh my God, there are so many basic things that actually impacting their productivity and they don't know how to use these basic tools.
And this also discourages disempowers them from economically, be more engaged in business economies, especially in the agricultural field.
During this time, we also realized that there's only 10% of even less than that women in renewable energy sector, and we decided to do a lot of career sessions and opportunities for girls and universities who are studying chemical engineering, who are studying biology, who are studying math.
They didn't know they can actually pursue career in this field.
They didn't know what is renewable energy.
Of course, they heard about it again, but they don't know that their profession can be actually part of it.
Now we took them to some site visits, and they actually went out there and they realized, wow, I can actually be part of this, I can pursue my career here because the stereotypes and male dominance in the field of renewable energy or climate change, um, spheres are so much stereotyped and discriminated against that women don't feel that they have safe space to be part of it.
They don't know that they can flourish there.
They don't know that they will be accepted by communities and male colleagues because communities on site and around also play a huge role.
It's not always colleagues.
It's also about the communities they're part of while they're working on certain sites.
Part of our work on climate change was related to reproductive health and rights because there are certain parts of Azerbijan.
We call it Aran zone.
There's a huge drought there.
And women sometimes have to work and manage the household work on the fields under very heat and no one talks about their stressful position they're in.
They might have menopause, they might have menstruation, they might be pregnant at that time, but still be under the heat and no one questions their well being.
So this is something that we do within an international organization, which is Asia Pacific Research Center or Reproductive Health of Women's Rights.
And then we felt during COP 29 the solidarity of different international organizations we've worked with, and we tried to bring as many expertise as possible to COP 29 spaces and beyond.
And that legacy brought a lot of paradigm to our work.
And now, whenever we try to organize events, we make sure that sustainability and climate change intersection related to gender is always there.
Another last point here, when it comes to water scarcity, you might not notice, but in the rural areas, there is a lack of the water in the villages, especially, women are the ones who have to fetch the water, but they're not in the decision making processes related to that.
We did community engagement activities.
We brought together teachers, principals, lawyers, whoever part of that rural area city close to that rural area.
So that they could go and educate, encourage those citizens in this villages population to be part of certain decision making processes.
It's not like going and shouting that you have rights.
No, it's about bringing together having this non formal space where they can strive and non formal space where they can be seen and a lot of times, maybe it's five people that they reach or ten people, but it's small impact, but we can still see how these people who are mobilizers, we call them multipliers on the places, how they go out and work with kids with communities there.
We bring them to Baku and then then we try to give them some tools and send them back to the regions and also outside of Baku.
So women participating in our projects, who said, we came here because not because, you know, it's nice to be in the project, but we came here because we want to be seen, we want to be recognized, because sometimes in our communities, our needs and our expectations, just our identities are not being seen.
Thank you.
Thank you, Marian.
And just one final question for you.
So you've raised so many important issues about the geography of where you live and what that means in terms of your access to opportunities, including related to decision making and economic empowerment.
And we heard also about climate and the impact that that's having on different communities.
We heard also about life cycle approaches, younger people, older people and how they have a nuanced impact.
I want to hear from you a little bit about what's your recommendation from that experience of bringing these different agendas together.
Thank you.
I would say intersectional and intergenerational approach is something that we need to have because as Kori also mentioned in opening remark, it's not homogeneous, so we need to understand what are the needs of the specific groups.
For me, surveys, data, this is something that we miss in Azerbijan as well.
We don't have much research and data in this field, and that's how policies should be developed.
Being through the certain needs and these needs are coming based on quality research and quantitative research.
This is something that I would recommend, first of all.
Secondly, I would say role of media here, importance of non biased media, media which questions, which criticizes and goes in depth when it comes to the needs of women, not just generalized women, but each group of them have a certain need and we need to educate media to be more gender sensitive and gender responsive when it comes to climate change adaptation and medication.
Thank you so much, Marianne.
Perfect.
I'm going to turn now over to Anne.
An, you've been working on issues related to care, safe public spaces, and housing and informal settlements for more than 25 years.
We know that in context of informality, it can be more difficult to introduce coordinated policies that consider each of these different needs.
Can you please tell us a bit more about how you have been working at the grassroots level to improve conditions for women in your community, including as part of informal settlement improvement initiatives.
Thank you.
I'll start by saying, I usually tell people that I'm proud to be born and brought up in the informal settlement because it was not my choice.
But I found myself there, and I come from Kenya.
It's a very long story because I really inherited from my mother, she rest in peace.
Because when I was young, I started realizing that women were really being marginalized in case there was any development coming in the informal settlements, in case there was anything to improve livelihood of the community at large, not noting that women were the majority in the informal settlements.
They were really marginalized.
But I could see my mother going to meetings here and there was still in school and growing up.
I think I got interested.
But the biggest challenge was that, Culture, despite of us being in the informal settlements, culture was still there, that women were not allowed to come and sit in any decision making table in the informal settlements or in the community, that was only the work of men.
Women were supposed to be following what men will come up with.
But then we kept on thinking as we grew up that term, we need to see change because we are also heading there to be women.
What we did at our early age, we thought it was very good to do mobilizations of the young girls, the young women who are around our community so that we could bring them together, share, listen to what they were hearing, their parents complaining in the house, all the male part of it was saying in schools and the rest.
That's how we started forming a movement in our local community in the informal settlements.
It really created some awareness because we were able now to see that we can create our own spaces, not to wait to be given spaces and with all the challenges that we are facing, When we talk when we talk of issues of sanitation, issues of toilets, issues of even very easy local things like accessibility to school because some of the schools where they were constructed for the girls and women and women going there maybe to sell the items which they had was not really very easy.
But after several initiatives in our community, we were able to be seen here people who were coming up and we were even being now recognized by our local village elders, our local elders in the community, and even government and despite of us being in the informal settlements, we were living there up to date, some of the informal settlements, we as quarters.
That was also another very big challenge because you could wake up in the morning, go to school, when coming back in the evening, you don't have a home.
And you know when aa doesn't have a home, it means the community doesn't have a home.
Those were the current situation we were facing in our local community, and I think that is where we got our passion to come and see that we need to be in this decision making tables where decisions are being made so that we are able now to inform our community back in the rural areas and also in our environment.
I just want to say to say that I want to give an example of organizing.
Because what helped us a lot in our community was part of organizing ourselves as women.
And even to date, we still organize ourselves as women so that we can reform networks, reform movements, and that's how now we are able to be recognized and I know people who are really know all over.
That's how again, we were able now to be noted with this global movement, and I'm proud to see that I'm part of the WIO Commission, starting from when I formed my organization.
We are many in Kenya, we are members of the WIO Commission.
Let me just read whatever I had been discussing with my community and also for myself.
It is nearly impossible to improve the condition of grassroots women in the informal settlements without organizing ourselves.
It is through organized collectives of grassroots women that we are able to secure a place in the decision making processes.
As I said, the organization ourselves bring us together in numbers so that we are able to be noted and included in decision making process.
Without organized collectives, it's hard for women to be considered or accommodated in decision making processes.
It is through organized groups that we are able to insist on issues that affect us to do with care, safety, and housing.
One thing we did a lot as women and made sure that we were very much involved in is the issue of enumeration because we realized that the enumeration process for people living in the informal settlements was headed by men.
Define, when we are not there for our voices to be heard, the numbers could always tell that we are being marginalized when it comes to the ownership of even the shelters that we were living in.
So we organized ourselves We came up with the different tools, strategies which we are using which we were being trained by other partners informal settlements and also with Wairo.
Wiro has a very good tool that I usually love it called the local to local Dialogue, which we use and also mapping.
We did mapping on ourselves.
How many women are we our different ages? Which challenges are we facing? Who owns these structures or who own land anywhere, either in urban or rural areas? I just want to say that when informal settlement initiatives in our community threatened to disinfrastctize us as women, what we did is to take the role of enumeration which we did, especially capturing widows, women led households.
We also did numeration and we are talking how many girls are in the informal settlements that are not going to school.
When women lead initiatives or interventions by data and evidence, it is difficult to turn women away from the decision making table.
And that's why I said that we were able now to be recognized and sit in the decision making tables.
The other thing we did, we kept on doing campaigns that we called it showing up.
Meaning, you need to show up in any process as a woman so that you are able to be there at the center of the decision making.
What we did, showing up in our community, local meetings is something that seems small for some people.
But for us, it was very important because showing up was making us being involved in our local development processes.
Our voices were heard.
We were also regarded as people who are taking care to other things in our communities.
We were also present at all minutes which were showing that we are able now to come and make up decisions and face the conditions that we were going through.
Something else we did was that when we were meeting together, we were making sure that we get support.
We organized to local dialogues where we called different stakeholders, different partners so that we are able to learn and understand what other different informal settlements are facing so that we are able now to have something like PI exchange.
Thank you so much, Ann.
One quick follow up question is, as you've outlined, you already have this extensive professional experience and you bring lived experience as well to the discussion.
I just want to hear from you as well, why is it important that we include grassroots women's voices in policymaking? What difference does it make? Historically, I know women have been marginalizing in policy making processes, and it is very rare even to date that when aggressive woman or a woman says that she wants to fight for a certain position, sometimes it tends to be difficult or they don't understand how a woman can lead the other men.
So for us, through our local to local dialogues, that is one of the key tool we use in Wiru.
We are able to make sure that we bring the policymakers at the grassroot level, not us going to look for them there are waiting for them to call us, we invite them, we tell them this is what is challenging us and this is what we want to spear ahead.
Like I want to give an example.
In the informal settlements, we don't have toilets.
The people who suffer when you don't have toilets are women.
But there was a policy which was being implemented, which we were not included, of the design of the toilets which are supposed to be done in our informal settlements.
And they did it without involving us.
But we were able to do even some mass protest until they were able to redo that policy to include the women so that we could tell them how we want that toilet to be redesigned, not only in our informal settlements, in other areas, even in the rural areas and also in our informal settlements.
And also the injustices that we were getting as women, not even accessing the water points in the informal settlements.
We were also able to sit in the drafting committee, which came up with a policy which was saying that women need to be involved when decisions are being made concerning what is affecting them in their own informal settlements and also in the rural area.
Thank you so much, Ann and thank you for illustrating that as well with such a concrete example that when women aren't there at the very granular level of what affects us in our daily lives, it can be ignored, overlooked, and reproduce these gender gaps and inequalities.
Let me turn now to Maria.
Maria, your work has been critical in providing victim survivors of violence against women with safe spaces to go, including safe houses and shelters.
Through your work, you also managed to ensure that these essential services were maintained throughout different crises, including related to the COVID 19 pandemic and to conflict affected areas in Ethiopia.
Can you please tell us a bit more about how you managed to ensure a continued access to shelter for survivors of violence in crisis contexts and what lessons did you learn? Thank you.
Thank you, Katie.
Thank you.
Thank you for giving me this opportunity and bringing this issue to the public and to this forum, especially.
I was a judge high court judge for many years.
When I was a judge, I see so many gaps.
Women will come to court, but they cannot afford for a lawyer, they lose the case.
The other party will have a lawyer and they lose the case.
When we come to the criminal bench, when I was working at the criminal pitch, the a court, you know, the prosecutor will file a case, and the first witness for the police is the woman herself.
She does not appear.
We give them another appointment, another appointment and case is closed.
Why? We started to ask why because the woman doesn't have a permanent place, she doesn't have a place to stay, and the court case takes longer time until the case is filed, so she will go somewhere else.
So the police cannot find her because she doesn't have a permanent place case closed.
Here the perpetrators free now.
He will go and commit another violence.
A lawyers, we said, women lawyers, we have to have an organization which could give free legal aid service to the women, and we formed Ethiopian Women Lawyers Association.
We were providing free legal aid service.
When when I left the court and I started to provide them with free legal aid, the women will come to you and you will provide them with a legal aid.
But they will ask, where am I going to stay today? I'm out on the street.
Women when domestic violence happens to them, the only thing in the Ethiopian context, only thing they take out is their kids, no money, no clothes, nothing.
They are empty handed.
They come for advice, for support, and they don't have anywhere to stay.
We see that gap and I said, why don't we have a safe house or a shelter, a temporary small shelter for women who run out and need a safe space and we opened the safe house with women capacity of six women.
But everybody was discouraging me and telling me, Maria, oh, you cannot manage it.
It is very hard to bring women together.
I grew up in a big family.
My mother had from two mothers, we are 17 in number.
My families.
My mother used to take for 122 boys and ten girls, she used to take off all of us and extended family families come.
She manages well.
I said it is managing a safe house is just like managing a house.
I have learned a lot from my mother, so I will manage it.
I started it.
But I managed it.
Si, ten, 20 after we reached 50 in the capital city in Addis, and we said we have to go out.
We started it in another place, in another region, and then we have six safe houses permanent and we had four emergency safe houses in the conflict area.
Out of the six safe houses, three of them are still now in the conflict area.
I will tell you about the conflict area.
Now, when women are there, women are referred from the police or from everywhere, they are referred to our safe house.
One safe house has a capacity of 550, but it's not what we accept.
We accept sometimes it can be hundreds.
No no bed, but we will use mattresses.
I'll tell you one thing what the police said.
He called and said, I want to send somebody.
We said, we don't have a space.
He said, Please, I will buy a mattress from my salary.
Just give her a space in your compound.
We said, Oh, no, don't buy a mattress.
We will buy the mattress.
He sent her, but it was she was in a terrible condition, terrible conditions.
We have terrible cases.
We have not only women, girls, small kids, a two year girl was rapped.
By an old woman who gave them a temporary shelter for her mother.
The mother used to daily laborer.
She left the girl with that person and he raped that old person raped her.
We have so many different kids.
Women raped on their way to school, mom person cut her throat and he left her bleeding.
She was in our safe house we have so many terrible stories in the safest.
It starts 2-17 year 17-years-old women raped when they were going to church early in the morning by a gun grip.
Many boys raped that old women.
We have the case.
So that's what we do in the SS.
What do we do? We provide them legal aid, provide them medical treatment, we provide them, and then since many of them are poor, we provide them with a skill training.
And we we even provide a safe house for women, students who were students who are brought up from the rural area to the city promising that they will give them a good education, the family member, but they didn't.
They were rapped and their cases were reported to the police that the girls were there.
They cannot go back to that family, they cannot go back to the rural area.
We said, why don't they continue their education? They continued their education.
We have many of them.
One became a doctor, medical doctor.
Oh.
Yes, you have to club.
She became a doctor, an engineer, an IT person.
E one became a psychologist, you know, you know, we need safe houses to provide to open a space for women to run to.
Any person, any one of us could be victims, you know, victims of violence.
You know, I always say Violence does not discriminate by education, income, profession, or background.
Anybody will be a victim, any of us will be a victim anytime.
That's one part thought to come to the COVID.
During COVID, many movements were restricted.
There are no movements, so women stayed at home, so many violence started to happen.
We closed our safe houses to protect the women in the safe house.
So the women were just the police couldn't do anything, you know, they were keeping them at the police station.
They were all around and they said, Okay, why don't we do a quarantine safe house? Open, immediate.
You know, when you run a safe house, you have to be immediate, quick.
You have to be quick.
We opened a quick quarantine safe house and we took women there, they will be screened, they will stay there, and then after that, we take them to the safe house.
That is how we manage the safe house.
And in the crisis situation, Ethiopia has a conflict, still now a conflict, and we had a very severe conflict.
One of the safe houses was at the conflict area.
And we have to rush, support the women.
There were many survivors of violence, dining war during conflict.
Always the other party uses women as a weapon of war.
They rape the women.
That's what they do.
The men, maybe they have gone to war or many men have left their women and they have gone.
The women were left with their kids and with their family.
So they come in there and they raped them.
One woman was raped by 16 men boys.
Imagine 16 at a time when we found her, she was in a terrible condition.
Rap older women, young women at the conflict time, raping was the weapon.
That's the weapon as they use it.
We have to rush and support them, support them, take them to the safe house, and bring them to the safe house, provide them with medical treatment, provide them with counseling.
They are traumatized.
A 16 me imagine if you are raped by even with two per two, even with one, you will be in a big trauma.
You have to do so many counseling to bring them out of that.
So we have done the way we were doing that all over the safe houses in the temporary safe houses in the emergency safe houses.
At the crisis at the conflict time, still it's going on.
The conflict is still there.
We even couldn't reach many of our women.
Still, women are in a very bad condition, so many medical complications are still at home.
We are working at it.
Since the number is very high, we couldn't even reach many of them.
And a bonus.
The other thing is because of the conflict, women have moved from one place to faraway places and their IDP camps, there comes internally displaced people's camp.
In one camp, you cannot imagine.
We have 20,000 people.
Maybe in one tent, there will be more than 2000 3,000 men and women in the same tent.
Here I am, here she is just squeezed together and violence also happens in the camps.
At the camps, you can see, we were one of our shelters there.
So rain comes, it's all over.
If you are there, you're sleeping, but the rain comes under your tent.
It's not well protected, you are squeezed, you don't get much enough.
It's not healthy.
Some of them may be pregnant, they may deliver their s there in the cold without any support.
So it is what's happening there.
The housing problems is there and what's happening everywhere at the conflict area is terrible, I tell you.
Thank you, Maria, and for really illustrating also the importance of knowing that access to essential services and to shelter services for women survivors of violence needs to be reliable, available, dependable, and needs to be there without delay.
Um, so based on all of this work that you've done, what recommendations would you have for governments and other stakeholders regarding the integration of shelter services for survivors of violence into broader discussions around housing policy, including in crisis context.
Thanks.
Shelters are often seen as temporary solutions, but in reality, they are critical part of housing systems and protection frameworks.
First, governments must recognize shelters are essential public services and integrate them into national housing policies and urban development plans.
Safe housing is fundamental to protection and recovery.
It's fundamental.
Second, we need sustainable and predictable financing shelters cannot depend only on short term or emergency funding.
Long term investment is necessary to ensure quality and continuity of service.
When you provide a service, the fund you get or the support you get is a short term.
You cannot that short term, you cannot tell the women, oh, the fund is finished, so go out.
You have to finalize and give them the full support, so it should not be um It's important to strengthen the continuation of care from emergency shelter to transitional and permanent housing.
We need permanent housing.
Shelters, our shelters run we rent houses to provide shelter.
Government, there is no governmental support.
You have to pay for the shelters.
It must be housing should be permanent, it should be.
The fourth is housing policies must be inclusive and crisis responsive, addressing the needs of displaced population, women in conflict settings, and other vulnerable groups.
Fifth, government should institutionalize partnership with women led organizations, recognizing their expertise and ensuring they are adequately resources.
Finally, we must strengthen coordination data.
Data is very important.
Sometimes government officials deny, there is nothing, no, there is no violence, there is nothing.
You have to put data and show them this happens here.
The violence happened here.
In crisis situation, this happened.
We have to have a data and we have to show them the data to everyone.
In conclusion, integrating shelters into housing policy is not just a technical issue.
It is about the rights, dignity, and safety.
We must ensure that no survivor is ever left without a safe place to go.
Thank you so much.
Our final speaker for this plenary panel discussion that we're having now, as I mentioned before, wasn't able to join us in person, and so we do have a prerecorded video with her.
As we're getting the video up, I will cue it in by sharing with you the question that I had asked her.
Her name was Rigel Olivri and I asked her Rigel.
Prior to becoming a law professor, you served as a trial attorney with the US Department of Justice, working in the Civil Rights Division, housing and civil enforcement section.
While working there, you dealt with several cases of sexual harassment in the housing context, yet you had no experts that you could call on for witnesses, and so you decided to fill that gap by becoming the expert yourself.
Can you please tell us a bit about what we now know about sexual harassment and housing in the US context.
Thank you.
We know that this is a serious and pervasive problem.
While we don't have great prevalence data yet, our best estimates are that 10-25% of low income women will experience sexual harassment at the hands of a housing provider at some point in their lives.
My research has confirmed my own experience from practice that this is a problem that affects low income women almost exclusively.
It usually occurs in housing on the private rental market, where the housing provider is a solo owner operator of the property, which is the most common ownership model in the United States.
The conduct itself has two noteworthy characteristics.
First, it is often extremely serious behavior that can be appropriately characterized as criminal.
This includes things like forcible rape, home invasion, sexual battery, and indecent exposure.
Second, in virtually every case, there are explicit requests or demands that the woman trade sex for rent.
These women are poor and will have a difficult time making rent payments and the perpetrator often knows that going into the rental relationship.
This is a predatory situation in which the landlord controls the women's access to a basic human need and the woman is faced with the choice of acquiescence or homelessness.
Moreover, this does not just affect the women who are targeted, but their families as well.
On that basis, what recommendations would you have for other people in the room here who might want to address sexual harassment in housing context? So the single biggest driver of this problem is women's lack of access to affordable housing.
In the United States, only 25% of people who are poor enough to qualify for housing assistance get it, meaning that the majority of low income women and families are forced to fend for themselves on the private market where they simply It's okay.
Thank you.
It was like we tried to bring her in the room with us here today.
Let's take a moment also for Rigel.
We do have as planned, a few minutes to open the floor.
If anyone has any questions, comments, or reactions, we would ask that you keep them rather brief, introduce yourself and where you're from and just stay focused, and then we'll give the opportunity to the speakers here to react.
We can take about two to three comments questions before turning back over here.
Thank you.
Go ahead.
Thank you for My name is Penny Kerrigan.
I come from the Haida Nation in Canada, Northwest Coast of British Columbia.
I worked from 2017 or the end of 2016 to 2019 at the Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women and Girls Inquiry for Canada.
At the end of that report, there were 190 recommendations, and that was in 2019.
The government of Canada has only implemented two of those recommendations.
But yet everybody thinks Canada is the best country in the world.
In fact, I do love Canada and I do love the politicians.
Because the previous politicians created a policy of apartheid in our country.
In our country, nobody wants to say, Canada has apartheid policies, but it still does.
I opened the Canadian Pavilion yesterday, but there's hope and there's women like you, all of you here that will enforce the change that needs to happen But I'm here from Canada, probably the only one speaking about that, and I'm at a loss because the violence against women around the world is horrific.
I was triggered by the little 2-year-old girl that was murdered because at the inquiry, I did 150 cases of murdered and missing women and girls over just less than a two year period, and it's horrendous.
It's horrendous because that kind of rape exists in Canada today.
And women and girls are missing.
We have all the highest rates of women incarcerated, women lacking houses, women relocated to urban centers, not from their communities, and yet we're totally underfunded.
I just needed to make that point that I thank you for your strength because I don't know if I could get up there and talk like that.
Thank you.
Ha.
Thank you.
We can take a couple more comments, questions.
Then over here, please.
Thank you.
Thank you, Catherine and the great expositions from the panelists.
Mi Rodriguez Blandon, I'm from Guatemala, from Guatemala and also from Guereo Commission and the Women and Habitat Latin American and Caribbean Network.
Also, we are members of the Global Coalition on Safer Cities for women.
And really, what you were mentioning is really what is happening here in Africa, and in Asia, in Latin America.
It is a country, that has no this kind of situations and we can set of violations against women and their violence.
We are also working with the University of Mexico and we In the meantime that we are doing the regional Congress on women and gender studies and feminists, the most important issue is that themes that we have to research regarding violence against women and girls.
Those sky studies are always on the top list of the themes that has been advancing in our countries and in our regions.
But still, studies are like here, researchers are like here, but policies are here, but we need to fight against impunity in our countries.
That's the most horrible things, impunity and you are a judge and you have been dealing with those situations.
In that case, I have to say that, for example, in Guatemala, we have the Cosgados the some kind of feminist side, divisions on the judgment.
Right now, they were operating very well for women.
But now men are also coming to this kind of bodies in the judicial system because they said, No, because the law is for men and women, so we are going to be requesting a protection from this kind of entities.
We said, Come on.
It's about the judges has to be very much aware that we were creating legislation specialized for protecting women and in the sense that we can advance in that sense, in that moment, it's going to be really doing some difference.
We are working with politicians, we are working with researchers, we are training, but we need to work mostly with the people in charge of providing justice and impunity.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
We have a question over here as well.
Okay.
Thank you very much, the panelists for the presentations.
They were very insightful.
My name is Ada Ono.
I work for the German Development Agency that is commissioned by the Federal Ministry for Economic Operations and Development.
I particularly support a projects for Somalia in the Puntland state.
For its own socioeconomic inclusion of women and youth who are internally displaced in Somalia, which you all know that is a conflict prone zone.
They also experienced the same challenges that you had mentioned even in their camps.
I'm also eager to know because it's a challenge that we're dealing with, what the government is doing, what mechanisms are they actually using or exist to hold maybe the landlords and the local authorities accountable when women report cases of sexual harassment in the camps and also evision threats in these spaces, rather emergency houses that you provide for them.
I'd like to actually learn from how you're handling that.
Thank you.
Thank you.
We had one final question at the back.
It would need to be very quick because it's a bonus.
We had said three.
No, but with the interpretation, we'll need the microphone.
Thank you.
Hi, I'm Aisha lander originally from Turkey.
I'm an academic, partner to W Road Commission and I work with foundation for the support of women's work.
First of all, thank you.
This was an amazing panel.
It just hits one in the heart.
The foundation for the support of women's work in Turkey, creates women and children's centers right after disasters and conflicts.
These are rooms for women and mothers run childcare centers.
Women can get together and talk among themselves about how to rebuild their lives.
The reason I thought about the women and children's centers, this is for earthquake survivors and so on because the women are displaced, there is violence there too.
But I They bring together refugee Syrian refugee women and local women.
That's very important because there's a lot of prejudice against refugee women from Syria.
They are targets of rape and all kinds of gender based violence.
But the reason I started thinking about it is because you said one of the survivors went on to become a doctor.
Did I mishear that? I think we should also hold on to that positive and long term vision.
The women and children's centers bring women together to overcome their isolation because a lot of the poor women are migrants from rural areas.
And when they come together, it's very empowering, this collective action.
They there's capacity building, they learn how to improve their skills to start businesses and so on.
It's long term looking.
So my suggestion is these shelters are very important.
But we need these women's spaces in every community during the regular times too.
It's not just like we shouldn't wait for conflict or disasters or these huge tragedies to happen, but there should be part of the social infrastructure in every community.
Thank you.
Thank you so much.
Thank you all for these really excellent points and questions.
Mindful of time, I will turn to our panelists.
I'm going to give each of you just one quick minute to respond to any of the points and questions that were raised.
We heard a lot of important ones like how do you overcome structural systems that don't create space for women's participation and that maintain systems of oppression.
We heard How can you hold institutions accountable? How do you hold individuals accountable and how do we have institutions that can be transformed in that sense? We heard about how do you in very particularly difficult situations, make sure that you still have places for women to name the violence that they have experienced and to seek action and impunity against it? How do we create long term spaces of solidarity for women and girls to be able to thrive and to make the change that we know is possible? So we can run down the line, I think, if that's okay.
Mary, I'm over to you.
Thank you.
I would like to thank our audience as well for sharing the stories, trying to connect with those experiencing violence.
We are in this room, but they're not here, unfortunately.
Maybe we do have some hidden survivors here we don't know of.
But most of them usually don't have access and opportunities to be vocal about their experiences and challenges they went through.
So thank you for bringing the survivors of violence into the room with our mind, with our heart.
That's why we are here.
That's why we're working for them to prevent further violence, to prevent further challenges for them.
One message I would say about how do we try to keep a you know, multi stakeholder dialogue, how we try to keep the communities is trying to identify ambassadors in different governmental institutions, international organizations, informal ambassadors who support our agenda, who are ready to listen to us, who are ready to A, there are not many, but who we have, we try to work with them closely so that they help us to paraphrase our messages in a more diplomatic and structural way that we get the trust and we work with them.
We try to invite them on the decision making table.
We try to invite them when we meet with young people, when we meet with women, especially with vulnerable women.
So they hear their stories, not just from us, but also from them, trying to narrow down for them what is a reality, not just on social media, not just on pictures, but actually make them listen to the population.
That's one of the ways that we try to keep going.
Thank you, Maria.
Okay.
From my Turkish sister, we don't only work on crisis.
We work even at peaceful time if there's peace here, but still violence is committed.
The one out of three women, violence is committed on her.
That's our safe houses everywhere.
It's not only in the conflict place in other safe houses.
We have safe houses all over the region.
We provide a safe house for these women.
The other thing is we have other programs.
We work with the community.
Community leaders, we go with the religious leaders, we involve them to fight gender based violence so that they will give them, they will give support to these women.
So we have wherever we work, we have a group of the elders, the women themselves, and the young ones together, they will talk about it.
And side by side, we create a women's space for themselves.
Women discuss alone in Ethiopian culture, Now, they are not using it, but the Ethiopian culture, women, our mothers or grandmothers, they always come for a coffee ceremony three times a day, one in her house, the other, and then afternoon, they come together, many of them, they discuss about their issue.
They discuss about their husband, they discuss about their problem.
Nowadays, everybody is going out working, but still in the rural area, that tradition is there.
We need, safe space where we can talk freely about our cases.
That's what it is.
Very.
Okay.
I can explain it to you to save time with you, we can discuss with the Somali problem, what we do in the IDP comes, how we handle it, how the government, everywhere when it comes to the women, it's not a priority of the government to tell you frankly, it's NGOs who are going.
Women organizations are there to serve them.
It's not the priority.
Then we can discuss more, okay? Thank you, Anne.
Thank you to the audience.
I'll talk about how we overcome evictions because we used to have a lot of evictions in our country though it's still there, is that educate the community to do mapping, get the data collection correctly so that when you are negotiating with the government or when you are negotiating with the policymakers, you are able to show the proof, to see the people who will be affected so that at least they're able now to go and sit down and discuss and see how to avert that that eviction.
The other thing is that making sure that women form networks so that when you are in a big network and a big movement, you're able to be listened to.
Because when they touch one, we all come out and they all listen to us.
Then at the end of the day, they still need our votes.
They'll come to look for us, we tell them, we need you to pass this this policy, make this policy which affecting us and then come back to us.
That's how we try to make that.
We are reducing.
You know very well in many countries, affordable housing is coming up and that is what is making a lot of evictions in the informal sets.
But then what we are right now doing, we are making sure that we are sitting in those committees, we are planning with them.
We are not yet there, but at least we are able to be at the drawing table and getting involved.
Right now we take advantage as we are here.
I'm just leaving this space attending our Kenya government meeting where I'm going to meet the CS because we had a challenge that the affordable houses being constructed are not affordable to us.
Noting that most of the informal settlements are women headed households.
So what I'm very proud to say that after doing a lot of negotiation, using our documentation of the data collection showing how many women or how many households are being affected, have changed now that they have come up with one of the affordable houses they're constructing, which will be at least a bit affordable to the graduates though it's not very conducive, but at least we can say that we are heading somewhere.
Thank you so much.
A huge thank you to our panel today.
And thank you to all of you for being engaged.
I see the time going down, and this is really the start of conversations that I hope we have the opportunity to continue during the rest of the week and to take forward with us.
I won't try and summarize all of the important things that we've heard today, but just to recall from the messages that we've been hearing as well that we are not starting from scratch.
So much has happened.
There's so much rich knowledge, experience, solutions, innovations, ideas, and recommendations.
This very room that we can take inspiration from and bring to our own cities and communities and to continue to push for that collective change that we need to see, for the transformation that we need for cities free of violence against women and girls and with housing that's affordable, accessible, and dignified for women everywhere.
Thank you so much.