Since 1984, the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) has worked with other NGOs to organise a seminar linking 8 March – International Women's Day – with disarmament, peace and security issues.  Each year, a report and statement from the NGO conference has been read into the record of the Conference on Disarmament (CD), the only official oral contribution from NGOs to this body.

This year the seminar will be in two parts.

March 5 is an NGO conference for briefings, discussion and strategising on gender, security and preventing conflict, and will be an opportunity to learn from experts on Security Council resolution 1325, gender and military budgets, landmines, small arms, nuclear weapons and security policy. Cosponsored by WILPF, the NGO Committee on the Status of Women, and the NGO Committee on Disarmament, participants will hear from Catalina Perdomo of the Stockholm Institute for Peace Research, Rebecca Johnson, activist and analyst on nuclear weapons issues, Cora Weiss, President of The Hague Appeal for Peace.  Other invited panellists include Sarah Masters the IANSA Women's Network Coordinator, Sylvie Brigot the Executive Director of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, and an expert on cluster munitions.

March 6 is an opportunity for dialogue among NGOs, governments and UN officials in a series of panels with a keynote speech during the lunchtime period will be followed by two panel discussions in the afternoon, all of which will take place in the Council Chamber of the Palais des Nations in Geneva.  Cosponsored by WILPF and the Geneva Forum, invited panellists include President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, Mary Robinson, Wangari Mathai and Naomi Klein among others.

The 2008 International Women's Day seminar will bring women together to discuss the next phase of activity in putting resolution 1325 to work so that it does more than add a few sentences to speeches, more than add a few women to UN departments and peacekeeping operations. Today military budgets are soaring, new weapons for killing and mutilating are under development, and 27,000 nuclear weapons remain threatening our very survival. Outdated military security doctrines and budgets of the Cold War prevail, and while they remain the vision of Security Council resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security cannot be fulfilled. 

Today it is clear is that in scales that matter, commitments to gender equality are not yet real.  Without women's participation and empowerment and without gender equality, sustainable peace, sustainable development and true human security are unattainable. The failure to finance gender equality is the failure to finance development and human security.


Consider the following facts: 

• US$ 5 billion is the amount of bilateral aid devoted to projects that promoted gender equality between 2001-2005 according to the OECD - which is what it costs to occupy Iraq for 2 weeks;
• The combined budgets of the UN agencies and programmes devoted to women is only $65 million   -  this is 0.005% of a world military expenditure of $1204 billion in 2006;
• More than two-thirds of the world's unpaid work is done by women – the equivalent of $11 trillion (approximately half of the world's GDP);
• Women make up 70 percent of the world's poor and 67% of the world's illiterate people – women still own just one per cent of assets worldwide;