The first meeting of the IDA Task Team on Women with Disabilities was held in Cairo, Egypt from 7-9 December 2018. The objective of this meeting was to identify the opportunities and define IDA's strategy towards inclusion of issues of women and girls with disabilities in the work of the UN and other development partners; and to promote leadership of women and girls with disabilities. This is the first meeting of the Task Team with participation from the Arab Organisation of Persons with Disabilities, the ASEAN Disability Forum, the European Disability Forum, the Pacific Disability Forum, the World Blind Union, and the World Federation of the Deaf.
It is worth mentioning that earlier this year IDA signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with UN Women headquarters to support UN Women’s work towards mainstreaming issues of women and girls with disabilities. UN Women has also recently come out with its corporate strategy on disability. There is now a great opportunity to leverage this strategy to encourage country programmes of UN Women to be more responsive towards issues of women and girls with disabilities.
As part of the first meeting, the Task Team also visited the Arab Regional office of UN Women. The meeting discussed specific needs that the regional office has and the expertise that IDA could bring to the table to address these needs. One of the activities under the MoU is to have site visits to UN Women offices. The Arab region will be one of the regions that will have a site visit next year. IDA will also conduct a needs assessment for the regional office to further identify areas where support would be required.
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