Dr Fehmida Mirza attended the ceremony arranged by the women Parliamentary Caucus for celebrating Women’s day, at the Serena hotel in collaboration with the UN. The ceremony was also attended by President, Dr Arif Alvi, Federal Minister for education, Shafqat Mahmood, Federal Minister for Defence Production, Zubaida Jalal, senior diplomats and UN representatives.
Dr Fehmida in her remarks stated that it is very encouraging to see women parliamentarian caucus achieving significant progress and also congratulated on successfully completing 10 years. She also reinforced that during this time period, there were a number of challenges that they had to face, but were all addressed with the collective efforts of women parliamentary caucus. While taking immense pride over the achievements of the parliamentary caucus, she expressed that this was her brainchild, and also that the current government is all committed to ensure social and economic empowerment of women. Ehsaas programme is one such example she emphasized.
In her speech she appreciated the fact that women in Pakistan are very competent. They are playing their role in the development of the country in all political, economic, social domains. She underscored that despite the fact that women are coming forward in politics and comprise 21% of the total parliamentarians, the overall statistics available showing strength of the working women are not very encouraging .Therefore, she stressed that still more efforts are to be made in order to bring an equality in the numbers of the working women to that of men.
Dr Fehmida also lamented the fact that females are deprived of the right to Inheritance in Pakistan. Therefore, she underscored that awareness need to be created amongst the general public more so in women so that they fight for their due rights she emphasized.
She concluded with the words
“Strong woman stands up for herself and stronger women stand up for everyone else.”
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