From Global Pledge to Local Action: Ending Digital Violence against All Women and Girls in Azerbaijan

Good morning and thank you for joining this important dialogue.

Yesterday was the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women and Day 1 of our annual global campaign, 16 Days of Activism against Gender-Based Violence.

To mark Day 2 of the 16 Days of Activism, we wanted to bring together our fellow Ambassadors and members of the High-Level Advocacy Group and our civil society partners and friends, who have been tirelessly working on advancing gender equality and women’s empowerment in Azerbaijan.

For those of you that are new, the High-Level Advocacy Group on Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment is a coordination group that brings together like-minded development partners that are committed to gender equality and are supporting Azerbaijan to accelerate progress towards SDG 5.  We each have different interlocutors and entry points for high-level advocacy, so we try to coordinate our messaging on key issues related to gender equality.

As the High-Level Advocacy Group, Gender-Based Violence has been one of the three priority areas for high-level advocacy (with other two being Women’s Economic Empowerment and Women, Peace and Security).  While the group has been stagnant for the past year (while meetings have taken place at the technical level), we have always come together for the 16 Days of Activism.  And I am glad that we are able to do the same this year.

The theme for this year’s global campaign is on ending digital violence against women and girls. You would agree that this is a very relevant issue across the world, including Azerbaijan.  While technology brings many benefits, it also creates new risks.  For many women and girls, the online world has become another space of harassment, threats, and abuse.  This is not virtual harm — digital violence is real violence, with real emotional, psychological, social, and even physical consequences.

Today, we look forward to hearing from Maryam/GenderHub and Sitara/VarYox on some of the work they are already doing at the local/community level to promote digital safety as an integral part of gender equality.  Of course, we expect our dialogue to go beyond digital safety, to safety of women and girls in general and how we as development partners can best support to end gender-based violence.  We are here to listen; we are here to support.

We hope this will be a forward-looking meeting, in that, we can agree on a few, concrete action points that we can take forward together as the High-Level Advocacy Group going forward.

Finally, as my tenure in Azerbaijan comes to an end, I do want to recognize and appreciate the resilience and perseverance of our civil society friends – the professional optimists.

It has been my true pleasure to partner with you all.

Thank you!