Josep Borrell and Jutta Urpilainen
In early 2020, Awa had just turned 15 years old when she heard that her marriage was being arranged. Escaping it seemed difficult, but Awa found the courage to defy her father’s decision. Her small village in Mali had a committee for the prevention of early marriage, and she took her case to them. This body of respected people presented Awa’s father with all the arguments against early marriage, and managed to convince him. It is to help the cause of young girls like Awa that the European Union supports this committee and many other projects in this area around the world.
Our goal as EU is for everyone to have the same power to shape society and their own lives. We are putting it black on white in our third Gender Action Plan, adopted on 24 November calling for a gender-equal world. Now, due to the significant setback that COVID-19 has brought on the global work on equality and as we watch civil society organisations, including women’s and LGBTIQ organisations facing shrinking civic and democratic space, stepping up in building gender-equal world is more important than ever.
Awa’s story is similar to those of many girls around the world who manage to gain control over their lives and stand up to gender- based inequalities and discrimination. They have a voice, they drive change, and they have the European Union by their side to support. Because women’s rights are human rights and because gender equality is a non- negotiable value of the EU, a value which should be reflected in EU’s external action and in the design of all EU development programmes.
It is with EU support that Tufahah Amin, Aziza Al-Hassi and Amine Kashrouda developed an application for online education in Benghazi. And that the Gaziantep Women Platform was launched last year to help more women participate in Syria’s political process. It is in the framework of the EU supported Digital2Equal initiative for online platforms that 15,000 women in India will get training in hospitality skills and can improve their earnings.
The challenges to gender equality are as varied as the contexts in which they emerge and call for context specific responses whether through multilateral fora, dialogues with partner countries to EU policy proposals or financing of concrete projects. Through our programmes on education, we aim to help more girls attend, learn and think of themselves as future drivers of change. We believe that education is also one of the most powerful ways of putting an end to isolation and abuse, for there is no exit option without economic self-sufficiency. We are embracing the notion of human security and integrating gender equality into our training programmes for EU crisis management operations, for example in the EUCAP Sahel Mali programme for internal security forces (EU Capacity Building Mission).