Restore Women Dev Policy 1997

The convention titled 'Beijing Plus Ten: Planning for Advancement' was organised by the Unity for Social and Human Action (USHA) and Steps towards Development at Cirdap auditorium in the city.

It was organised to form a strategy paper for women's advancement at national level on the basis of twenty review workshops at grassroots level before and after the Beijing Plus Ten review meeting 2005.

Though long ten years have passed since the fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, the condition of the majority of women in all regions has become worse than they were ten years ago, said member of CEDAW Committee Salma Khan while reading out the keynote paper.

"Little headway has been made in addressing persistent issues like violence against women. State actions were very limited to deal with violations of women's rights in private sphere," she added.

Salma however mentioned that considerable progress has been made in recognising the gender dimension of poverty and integrating the gender perspective in most government policies and programmes.

Terming the women's issues as cross cutting one Secretary General of Bureau of NGO Affairs C Q K Mostak Ahmed said programme based approach is needed in this field.

"It is good that we have reached a national consensus on women's rights. The government and NGOs should work with partnership," he added.

While discussing the keynote paper woman leader Maleka Begum said most of the programmes related to women remains confined to roundtable discussions or such other programmes.

"It is time for us to take initiatives for institutionalising the women's issues by ourselves, we should not wait for government steps on them," she added.

Senior Development Advisor of Canadian High Commission Silvia Islam was present on the occasion.

Presided over by Executive Director of Usha Hosne Ara Khan, the programme was also participated by Prof Latifa Akand and President of Bangladesh Women Chamber of Commerce and Industry Selima Ahmed.