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Deputy Executive Director for UN-Women, Lakshmi Puri, has called for increased empowerment for women when it comes to accessing mobility. She made the statement at an event for women and mobility at the 58th Session of the Commission for the Status of Women.
The event, titled “Equitable Urban Mobility – Supporting the Empowerment of Women and Girls” was coordinated by UN-Habitat to highlight the challenges facing women and girls in cities around the world every day as they try to access employment, education, and childcare and recreation facilities in the context of unsuitable, unaffordable and often unsafe transport and mobility systems.
Speaking at the event, Ms Puri said that mobility in cities was extremely important as it was closely linked to access to education, health services, access to water and sanitation. UN-Habitat’s representative, Hilary Murphy, highlighted extracts from the recent Global Report on Human Settlements: Planning and Design for Sustainable Urban Mobility and explained that more data was needed specifically around the access that women have in cities around the world in order to inform projects in this area.
Immediately following the event, there was also a guided safety walk around the neighborhood showcasing a new urban safety mobile phone app called Safetipin. Safetipin allows users to assess the safety of an area based on information uploaded by other users with respect to street lighting, frequency of use and other safety-related criteria. It also allows victims to upload information about previous safety incidents to highlight hotspots of violence or crime in any given area.
In a statement read on her behalf at the opening of the Commission, UN-Habitat Deputy Executive Director, Dr Aisa Kacyira, said:
“Cities generally offer women more diverse work opportunities to increase financial independence, greater ease in accessing education at different levels, better access to healthcare, more chances to socialize outside the home, more opportunities for filling community or political leadership roles and, perhaps most importantly, more possibilities to redefine traditional roles of men and women.”
While affordability of transport for the urban poor, accessibility and, economic and social equity have recently become topical concerns of urban mobility; the gender specific challenges of urban travel are often neglected. There is a strong relationship between poverty and lack of access to adequate urban mobility. |
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