** ALL FUNDS RAISED FROM THIS SINGLE GO TO THE UN WOMEN NATIONAL COMMITTEE **

The International Women’s Day campaign will be split between UN Women programs in Pakistan and the Pacific.

In Pakistan and across the Pacific region, UN Women delivers essential education programs, training and coaching to empower women. These include:
· Mentoring to help women make effective legislative and policy changes in their community.
· Rights training so that women can exercise their rights as landowners.
· Social and workplace protection to provide women with equal access to good jobs with equal pay and to protect women in vulnerable work.
· Vocational training.
· Entrepreneurship programs to foster growth for women in the marketplace.

UN Women also provides leadership training to prepare women to stand in, and win, elections. UN Women teaches core skills including how to effectively engage and consult with community; campaigning, policy-making and media skills, while boosting women’s confidence. UN Women also runs programs that provide women market vendors with financial literacy training and marketing workshops, as well as helping them to find secure accommodation and preventing violence and theft.

A more specific example of a fantastic program that UN Women is delivering in Pakistan involved helping vulnerable women, such as widows, access land rights:

Women’s access to land rights is a critical asset for Durdana, a young widow, and other vulnerable rural women like her. Before becoming tenants and without the security of tenure they were unable to make long-term plans and invest in farming, protect themselves from the impacts of natural disasters, or even enhance their standards of living. In many cases, these women were coerced to leave their lands when the crop cycle was at the final harvesting stage resulting in heavy economic losses and psychological trauma for them and their families. In the absence of formal written agreements, they were unable to protect their rights to reap the full benefits of their crop.
UN Women Pakistan, in collaboration with local partners, is working with vulnerable rural women farmers, like Durdana, to acquire land tenancy rights from their feudal and tribal landholders. These landless women farmers were trained and mentored to prepare tenancy agreements and landholding maps with their male landlords. In the process, they have been provided with a viable livelihood option that could take them out of poverty and enable their upward social mobility.

“I do not know anything else but working in the fields. Who could think a poor female widow like me would be given land! For the first time in my life I can say something is mine. This land, as far as the eye can see is mine - this paper says so. This is my land and I am its queen” - Durdana, new land owner and farmer.