Press Release - Pia: "All the sustainable development goals can be achieved if we empower women"

Hello everyone, I am so happy that we're here together, not the usual Senate people. We have our guests. And when we have our guests, it allows us to have a broader audience.

So we are joined today by Dr. Leila Joudane of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), also from the Philippine Commission on Women, Atty. tty. Khay Ann Borlado; and we have representatives from the different UN offices. And as we were discussing with Leila just a few minutes ago, she was explaining to me how the work that we do for women is embedded in all the UN agencies. And if you recall, that's always what I talk about when I talk about my Committee, the Committee on Sustainable Development Goals, Innovation, and Futures Thinking. All the sustainable development goals can be achieved when we empower women. If you take out the empowerment of women, then it makes it extremely difficult to even consider how we are going to go about achieving those other goals. Like how do you achieve better education for all if women are not included? How do you achieve better health when women are dying while they are having birth, when they can't even plan how many children they are going to have? How do we plan sustainable cities when women don't even have the support they need to raise their family in their own homes? They can't even work, hindi man lang makapag trabaho dahil no one's going to be left behind to take care of their kids.

So it's really integrated and I am happy that we're totally aligned on this. So later on, after we... and this is inspired by Sen. Loren, one of my idols. We are no longer doing ribbon cutting. We are doing ribbon untying. So when we do that, then we are going to walk you through the lives of different women. It's so interesting how we will get a glimpse, because many of us have not had the experience of being an OFW, there's also a farmer, there's one lady who now has a technical job but she had to do it in a foreign country, facing a lot of discrimination. So iba't ibang klase ng kababaihan ang makikita niyo in our exhibit, the lives that they go through. And what I love about it is pinapakita dito yung buhay ng mga babae, all facets of it.

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