Gender Equality
Even today, hundreds of millions of girls and women still have to fight to have their rights respected, while continuing to face gender discrimination in almost every aspect of their lives.
The international community has made specific commitments to gender equality with the adoption of the Convention on the Rights of the Child and Adolescence, the declarations of the Beijing Conference in 1995, and the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development Goals. However, we are still far from the goal. As long as half of the human population is denied fundamental rights, it will be impossible to create a fair, prosperous society where everyone can fully realize their potential.
Against inequality
Terre des Hommes places gender equality at the core of its interventions. In developing countries where we operate, girls constitute the majority of beneficiaries of projects for basic education, informal education, and vocational training. Their specific needs are taken into account in the organization of educational activities, remedial courses, and in the renovation of school buildings and related facilities.
Awareness campaigns aimed at parents and communities always emphasize the rights of girls to study, play, and have leisure time, highlighting the risks of early marriages and pregnancies, harmful traditional practices such as female genital mutilation, and gender-based violence.
Maternal and child health interventions, respecting the cultural context, provide family planning services and information on sexually transmitted diseases, even for very young girls.
Interventions to provoke change
In emergencies and in contexts particularly at risk of phenomena such as trafficking, exploitation, sexual abuse, and early marriages, specific projects offer protection to girls to reduce risks and provoke cultural changes, also leveraging youth leadership. For example, in Bangladesh, we developed an app managed by a group of young female leaders to protect the younger residents of the slums of Dhaka from gender-based violence.
Income-generating programs prioritize girls and women where possible, considering their high economic vulnerability, also offering training in capital management and productive activities.