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The Asia Pacific region has both the world’s largest proportion of workers in the working-age population and the world’s lowest unemployment rate. However, only 44.5 per cent of women are employed and for those who are working, access to dignified employment opportunities remains a challenge. Discussing the opportunities that exist to ensure the world of work is gender equal was the focus of the side event Transforming the Future of Work for Gender Equality at the recent Asia-Pacific Ministerial Conference on the Beijing+25 Review in Bangkok.

“I’ve been doing this work for 30 years, so to come to a space like this and have everyone in the room start from a place of ‘we have a problem’ is powerful.” - Robin Runge, Senior Gender Specialist, Solidarity Center.

The safe space referred to above was the recent Business of Women at Work event, where more than 150 garment industry stakeholders from 10+ countries across Asia gathered to discuss solutions to the challenge of violence and harassment within supply chains.

South Africa has some of the highest rates of gender-based violence (GBV) in the world. But it is also at the forefront of global efforts to understand more about GBV and specifically how to prevent it, hosting the 2019 conference of the Sexual Violence Research Initiative (SVRI). CARE colleagues joined experts, researchers, practitioners, campaigners and activists from across the world to hear from them and share CARE’s work. Now the question is how to build on this evidence and where to go from here.