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Women Friendly Cities Challenge: an International Collaborative Project


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In October 2016, at the UN Habitat III conference in Quito, Ecuador, Women Transforming Cities (WTC) hosted a side event called the Women Friendly Cities Challenge. This event was moderated by the Huairou Commission (an umbrella organization for grassroots women organizations based in New York), and had a panel of speakes from WTC, Women in Cities International (WICI- Montreal) and the Seoul Foundation of Women and Family (Korea). The panel spoke of strategies that were working towards making their respective cities more women friendly.

The idea of building a framework which would provide goals in various domains linked to internationally agreed upon documents, such as the UN Habitat outcome document, the New Urban Agenda, and the 2015 Sustainable Development Goals was introduced. The idea was to develop goals under various categories with “wise practices” listed under each goal and ways to measure and monitor these practices also provided. Cities or other organizations would then be able to assess their progress towards the goals and the framework could become a sharing and networking tool. This idea had enthusiastic audience support and Women Transforming Cities is now in conversation with the other partners in moving this idea forward. We have interested interns from the UBC School of Community and Regional Planning to assist with this project, and will be reaching out to other potential collaborators in the next few months.

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