International Women’s Day 2015

Celebrate International Women’s Day with CBM

This International Women’s Day we bring you a series of interviews with women with disabilities working in leadership positions in human rights and also development. This article features a wide range of testimonies, from political to very personal contributions. We are delighted to have interviewed the UN Special Rapporteur on the rights of persons with disabilities, Ms Catalina Devandas, and Rosangela Berman Bieler, Chief of the Disability section in UNICEF on their roles. We have also interviewed women with disabilities who are at the front line working as advocates for change - Stephanie Ortoleva from Women Enabled, Alba Gonzalez and Diane Kingston from CBM and Sonja Vasic from Handicap International.

This Day we celebrate these women and their roles in bringing about change for women and men and boys and girls with disabilities. It also underlines the enormous challenges that remain. All contributions underscore the urgent need to make gender equality and women's rights a reality. This will require to make women rights a top priority in all our actions, not just a media priority once every year.

Why should women and girls with disabilities be included in the disability and women’s right movements? Stephanie Ortoleva, founder of Women Enabled International explains.

If you are curious about the opportunities and challenges in progressing the human rights of women and girls with disabilities, you can read what Rosangela Berman-Bieler, Chief of the UNICEF Disability section has to say about it, along with the opinion of the UN Special Rapporteur on Disability, Ms. Catalina Devandas, and lastly that of Ms. Iratxe Garcia, Chair of the FEMME Committee of the European Parliament.

Know more about Sonja Vasic, a medical doctor with a disability, who talks about her experiences in the field in this article.

If you are interested in gender and disability as cross-cutting issues, and want to know more about gender norms and roles, read Christin Lidzba’s opinion piece. 

In this article Alba Gonzalez talks about what is important to her as a woman with a disability and the work she does to influence EU policy.

If you want to know how the UN CRPD committee is developing a General Comment on the rights of women and girls with disabilities, then follow Diane Kingston’s interview here.