The Speaker of Parliament Rebecca Kadaga has urged western donors to fund women entrepreneurial projects especially in developing countries.
Kadaga, who is in New York leading the Ugandan delegation for the 62nd Session of the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women (CSW62) said the Word Bank and other agencies should instruct governments to spend part of donor funds on projects that support women empowerment initiatives.
“If they are talking about supporting women in this world, energizing them, giving them capacity, let them come with specific instructions to our governments that part of this must go to the women,” she said at the a session held under the theme: ‘Challenges and opportunities in achieving gender equality and the empowerment of rural women and girls’.
Kadaga said since budgeting is now programme based, it is better for donors to bias their financing to women projects, adding that women make up a majority of the rural workforce in developing countries like Uganda.
Kadaga also met with Americans of Ugandan descent on the sidelines of the conference and said they should be helped to participate in economic activities back home.
“As a government we need to provide the necessary environment so that they can operate economic activities in both worlds,” she said.
Uganda’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations in New York Ambassador Adonia Ayebare said that supporting the Diaspora to invest in Uganda will help the country to benefit from their contributions.
“When we have grassroots movements like this bringing people together about the issues that affect them in the Diaspora…once you have these movements in the coming years, you will have a genuine Diaspora community,” said Ayebare.
The annual two-week session of the Commission brings together representatives of the United Nations, the UN Member States, as well as organizations and advocates from around the world to discuss the status of women. The Commission also assesses progress in implementing the 1995 Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, an important global policy document on gender equality, and takes up other issues involving the rights and welfare of women and girls.
The session will also address; participation in, and access of women to the media, and information and communications technologies and their impact on, and use as, an instrument for the advancement and empowerment of women.
The session will be focused on making resolutions on how governments can best engender economic empowerment and entrepreneurship of women, agriculture and food security and governance especially on political decision making. Other areas are finance and gender budgeting.
Other Ugandan officials at the session include the Minister of Gender, Labour and Social Development, Janat Mukwaya, the Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Gender, Pius Bigirimana, among other officials.
