News

Mountain Women in a post-Rio+20 world

01.10.2012

Mountain women will come under the spotlight in October as the government of Bhutan holds an international conference on gender and sustainable mountain development.

The conference, Bhutan+10: Gender and Sustainable Mountain Development in a Changing World, is being organized in the context of the Mountain Partnership with key support from the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD).

The event comes a decade after Bhutan organized a global event entitled Celebrating Mountain Women, which focused attention on women in the context of sustainable mountain development during the 2002 International Year of Mountains.

Ten years on, Bhutan+10 will bring together mountain women and men, researchers, policy makers, and development practitioners from the Hindu Kush Himalayan region and around the world to take stock of developments and set a new agenda in a post-Rio+20 world.

The expected outcomes of the conference include sharing emerging knowledge on gender issues related to natural resource management, climate change adaptation and sustainable development in mountain contexts as well as strengthened frameworks for integrating gender into policies, institutions and programmes.

Bhutan+10 will also celebrate the International Day for Rural Women, which is marked on 15 October each year.

The conference takes place 15 Oct 2012 - 19 Oct 2012 in Thimphu, Bhutan and is organized by Bhutan’s Ministry of Agriculture and Forests and the National Commission for Women and Children.

Bhutan+20 is supported by the German Agency for International Cooperation, the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development, the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation, the International Fund for Economic Development, the Mountain Partnership Secretariat, the World Bank, the Food and Agriculture Organization, the Canadian International Development Research Centre and the SNV Netherlands Development Organisation.

For more information and a full programme, see http://www.icimod.org/bhutan+10/.

Photo: Flickr/Mishimoto