'Interventions needed to address women empowerment'

The Ambassador of Denmark in Uganda, Mogens Pedersen, has called for strategic interventions to address women empowerment and gender inequality rather than just talking about mainstreaming the issues.

"You have been saying that gender should be mainstreamed but we should focus on it at some degree otherwise the little effort easily disappears leaving no impact," he said.

Ambassador Pedersen observed that often gender issues come as the last bit of the agenda after all energies have been spent on other issues, consequently no attention is paid to them.

He was addressing a group of Ugandans travelling to Copenhagen to attend the Women Deliver 2016 conference next week who met him at the Royal Danish Embassy in Kampala on Wednesday.

Over 5,000 participants, including global health professionals, donors, journalists and policymakers will attend the largest global meeting on advocacy for women and girls' health and rights in Copenhagen next week.

The ambassador noted that the issues on the agenda at Women Deliver 2016 are extremely relevant for Uganda.

"Gender equality is not only a women's right but an engine of economic development," he said adding that it has been at the centre of social equality in Denmark.

He urged participants to use the opportunity to network and build contacts with the vast numbers of experts and partners at the conference.

The UN Women country representative, Hodan Addou, said that Uganda had a strong Constitution that protects women but observed that there were still many challenges.

"As we advocate for rights of women, we need to look at women's decision-making power and ability to determine the type of services they want," she said.

Sylvia Sinabulya, outgoing Woman MP for Mityana noted that in the past seven years parliament and civil society organisations have worked together to make government accountable for services to women.

"We have had milestones. When we wanted to increase the number of midwives, we worked together and government responded. When we wanted to improve health infrastructure, we approved a loan for it," she said. She called on participants to continue working together to improve things.