To celebrate International Women's Day and Women's History Month, Women Thrive Worldwide (formerly the Women's Edge Coalition), in cooperation with The Democratic Women's Working Group of the Congressional Women's Caucus, held a Congressional briefing on global women's issues March 16, 2007. Before a standing-room-only audience of staff from Congressional offices and international nonprofits, ten leaders from organizations working with women worldwide spoke about a range of issues important to women globally.

The purpose of the briefing, entitled The 110th Congress: An Agenda on Global Women’s Issues was to outline what concrete actions this Congress, with the first woman speaker and more elected women representatives than ever before, could take as part of U.S. foreign policy for women worldwide. Each speaker not only focused on the importance of their issue, but also spelled out what opportunities for action were before Congress.

Below is a summary of each speaker’s call to action.

Ritu Sharma Fox, Co-Founder and President, Women’s Edge Coalition (Edge):
Edge is the leading nonpartisan organization working to shape U.S. policy to benefit women living in poverty worldwide. Ritu focused on the new gender policy of the Millennium Challenge Corporation, the international assistance organization set up by President Bush. Edge has played a leading role in advocating for the gender policy, which is groundbreaking and includes women in developing countries in all stages of the MCC’s work; the comprehensive and far-reaching new gender policy influences $2.3 billion worth of current projects in several developing countries, and will be mandatory for any new countries that work with the MCC in the future. She urged Members of Congress to monitor implementation of the policy.

Ritu also urged Members to support Edge’s Global Resources and Opportunities for Women to Thrive (GROWTH Act), which will be reintroduced in the House and introduced in the Senate with bipartisan support in the next few weeks.  The Act focuses on changing U.S. international assistance programs to focus on economic empowerment of women through increased access to credit and training, greater control of property and assets, and access to good jobs and to the benefits of trade.

Katrin Kuhlmann, Senior Vice President, Global Trade, Women’s Edge Coalition (Edge):
The biggest opportunity this year on global trade issues that Katrin urged members of Congress to support is a ‘Duty Free Quota Free’ market access proposal.  This seeks to remove duties and increase access to the U.S. market to 100 percent for ‘least developed countries’.  Currently, the access is at 97 percent, but excludes important sectors like agriculture in which women are the vast majority of workers. The proposal will also simplify export processes for smaller countries, and very importantly for women, add a provision on ‘non-discrimination’ protecting women from discrimination in the workplace in export industries. This proposal would expand access to the benefits of trade for more poor women.

Carolyn Bartholomew, Executive Director, Basic Education Coalition
Carolyn pointed out that 77 million children worldwide do not have access to an education, and the bulk of them are girls.  Increasing access to girls’ education boosts economic opportunity, reduces fertility rates, prevents AIDS and increases women’s civic participation. It’s estimated that a $1 billion dollar commitment is needed from the US for education as part of its international assistance, but funding has lagged at less than half that in recent years.  Carolyn urged Congress to support increased funding at $800 million this year.

Bama Athreya, Executive Director, International Labor Rights Fund (ILRF)
Bama pointed to the fact that millions of women and children work under poor conditions worldwide.  In 2005, 211 million children were working overseas, and adult women work in export-oriented industries such as cut flowers and agriculture which are often dangerous to them.  ILRF’s research in the cut flower industry, for example, found that 55 percent of women experience violent intimidation and sexual harassment in the workplace. She urged support for the anti-sweatshop bill supported by ILRF, The Decent Working Conditions and Fair Competition Act, which bans the import of goods produced under poor conditions.

Leslie Calman, Vice President, External Relations, International Center for Research on Women (ICRW)
Leslie focused on child marriage, an issue which affects over 51 million girls worldwide mainly in Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and Nicaragua. Marrying off girls is often the only choice poor families have, but it often leads to domestic violence, abandonment and increased health risks like HIV-AIDS for the girls. She urged support of the Child Marriage and Protection Act, supported by ICRW, which will be reintroduced before Congress in the next few weeks.

Joan Libby-Hawk, UN Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM)
UNIFEM is the U.N.'s development agency for women.  Funding for it, like funding for organizations like UNICEF, are separate from the annual contributions the U.S. makes to the U.N. as a whole.  Making the case on UNIFEM’s behalf, Ritu Sharma Fox of Edge urged much greater U.S. contributions to UNIFEM and especially to its Trust Fund to Eliminate Violence against Women, which works with abused women all over the world.

June Zeitlin, Executive Director, Women’s Environment and Development Organization (WEDO)
June spoke about UN reform, which is not generally seen as an issue important for women.  However, under the current UN system, women’s rights are very low on the agenda.  While children’s organization UNICEF for example has a $2 billion annual budget, UNIFEM and other smaller women-oriented U.N. agencies have a combined budget less than a quarter of that.  She urged Congress and the U.S. government to support a proposal broadly supported by women’s organizations and the UN Secretary General, to consolidate all the agencies dealing with women into one larger, more effective agency as part of U.N. reform.

Yolanda Richardson, CEO, Center for Education and Population Activities (CEDPA)
Yolonda spoke about family planning, which has become a partisan issue lately because the focus has narrowed to a few issues, which are controversial domestically, like abortion.  However, she stressed that it needs bipartisan support because the issue is very broad, including education and access to contraception, women having the ability to choose when and how many children to have, engaging and educating men and boys on the importance of women’s reproductive health. U.S. funding for such programs has been significantly slashed in the last few years, resulting in important programs being cut.  She urged Congress to support increased U.S. funding in 2008 bringing it up to 1995 levels, when it was at a historic high.  She also commended Congress for continuing to fund the UN Population Fund, UNFPA.

Jodi Jacobson, Executive Director, Center for Health and Gender Equity (CHANGE)
Jodi focused on women and HIV/AIDS.  Women are the majority of new infections, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, and 80% of new infections there are because of unprotected sex.  She stressed that current U.S. global AIDS policy is inadequate since it is stresses abstinence-until-marriage programs, though a largest increase in infections is among married women. She urged support of the PATHWAY Act, which will remove the requirement that one third of U.S. funding go primarily to HIV-AIDS prevention activities go to abstinence-until-marriage programs.  She also urged support for programs to combat violence against women, since this is a major cause of HIV infections.

Alex Arriaga, Director of Government Relations, Amnesty International
Alex focused on two issues. One is the International Violence Against Women Act (I-VAWA) on which Amnesty is working with Women Thrive Worldwide (formerly Women's Edge Coalition) and Family Violence Prevention Fund.  The bill mandates increased focus on programming to end violence against women as part of U.S. assistance, and will be introduced this spring. She pointed out that one third of women worldwide will face abuse in their lifetimes, and that domestic violence is a human rights violation. She also urged Senators to support the U.S. ratification of CEDAW, the International Treaty for the Rights of Women. The U.S. is currently the only industrialized nation, and one of just eight countries worldwide, that have not ratified it.