ISLAMABAD: United Nations Women, the UN Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women, and UNICEF, the United Nations Children’s Fund, commemorated the ‘UN International Day of Girl Child’ with a cricket day for girls.
The event took place at Pakistan Sweet Homes (PSH) last Saturday, as more than 70 girls from four different schools and 15 women from the expatriate community participated in the event, said a press release.
A total of 350 spectators, organisers and cricket players took part in the event. Young girls from Mashal Model School, Millennium Roots Schools, National Special Education Centre and Pakistan Sweet Homes played a number of cricket matches in an all-day tournament to celebrate the day, it said. The UN International Day of the Girl Child promotes girls’ human rights, highlighted gender inequalities that exists between girls and boys and addressed various forms of discrimination and abuse suffered by girls around the world, it added.
According to the statement, at least 1.1 billion girls of the world are part of a large and vibrant global generation poised to take on the future. Yet, the ambition for gender equality in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) highlighted the preponderance of disadvantaged and discrimination borne by girls everywhere on a daily basis, it said. A UN official said, “Only through explicit focus on collecting and analysing girl-focused, girl-relevant and sex-disaggregated data and using these data to inform key policy and programme decisions, can we adequately measure and understand the opportunities and challenges faced by girls and identify and track progress towards solutions to their most pressing problems.”
The theme for this year’s International Day of Girls on October 11 was ‘Girls Progress equals Girls Progress: What Counts for Girls.’ UN Women and UNICEF thanked to the Millennium Roots Schools, Pakistan Cricket Board (PCB) and Pakistan Sweet Homes for their strong support in organising the cricket day to promote girls’ rights in Pakistan.
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