A record total of eight individuals were honored for their work on 18 October. The impressive number of awardees shows that staff are increasingly integrating a gender perspective in their work and highlights that gender equality and women’s empowerment is taken seriously within ESCWA.
The awards are part of the larger work that ESCWA is undertaking to implement the UN System Wide Action Plan (SWAP) on Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women. Since 2013, ESCWA has advanced considerably with regards to SWAP implementation and impact and consistently “exceeds requirements”.
Mehrinaz El Awady, Director of the ESCWA Centre for Women, announced the awardees.
This year, the Gold Award went to a team of five persons from two different divisions. This team has been instrumental in institutionalizing the gender marker at ESCWA, which allows ESCWA to retrieve programmatic and financial information on gender to better track mainstreaming progress:
- Tarcisio Alvarez-Rivero, Programme Planning and Technical Cooperation Section
- Carla Ziade, Programme Planning and Technical Cooperation Section
- Rana Touma, Information and Communication Technology Section
- Alan Rechdan, Information and Communication Technology Section
- Tina Durieux, Programme Planning and Technical Cooperation Section
The Silver Award goes to two women who have excelled in a male dominated field. They are two of only four in the entire UN system who obtained the “Revised Close Protection Officers Certification” and became qualified to provide close protection to UN personnel:
- Security Officer Racha Kanj, Security and Safety Section
- Security Officer Rita Mikael, Security and Safety Section
The Bronze Award awardee has systematically mainstreamed gender within the publications of the Economic Development and Integration Division, particularly ESCWA’s annual flagship publication, “The Survey of Economic and Social Developments in the Arab Region,” through the introduction of the Gender Dynamics Section:
- Nathalie Khaled, Economic Development and Integration Division
All three awards were presented during a town hall meeting, during which the Executive Secretary of ESCWA, Mohamed Ali Alhakim, congratulated the winners and encouraged all staff to continue to collaborate in order to ensure the regional commission’s outstanding work.
