As the second week of CSW 56 gets underway at the United Nations in New York, you can catch up with all of our related reporting on our gender page. Here’s a brief overview below.

Opening of the fifty-sixth Commission on the Status of Women (CSW). Credit: UN Photo/Paulo Filgueiras

Rural Women

• Echoing one of the priority themes of CSW this year, IPS correspondents report from India and Bangladesh in this two-part series: “Rural Women Are Leading the Way – Will the World Follow?” Read part one. Read part two.

• “We suffer from vaginal inflammation and dropped womb (prolapse) because we are running around all day gathering firewood, drying it out, lugging water, cooking, checking on the crops, feeding the animals, and taking care of the kids,” a community leader of rural women in Peru‘s northern coastal region laments: Peru: Time to Adapt to Climate Change Impact on Women’s Lives

Credit: Naimul Haq/IPS

• How a group of smallholder farmers are coping with the unusual weather patterns caused by climate change deep in rural Plumtree: Zimbabwe: Farmers Tackle Water Problems Fuelled by Climate Change

Gender-Responsive Budgeting

• Gender budgeting is another focus of the meeting and IPS reports from Warsaw in Little Money to Promote Gender Equality in Eastern Europe.

• The phrase “financing for gender equality” may sound dry, but it lies at the heart of some of the most intractable problems faced by women around the world today: Q&A: How to Reverse the ‘Feminisation of Poverty‘

• An interview with Liane Schalatek of the Heinrich Böll Foundation in North America looks at one dimension of this issue: Climate Funding Needs Gender Equity.

Women Leaders

• A new U.N. report shows that although 40 to 50 percent of members of political parties globally are women, only about 10 percent hold positions of leadership: Women Still Trapped Below Glass Ceiling of Party Politics

Credit: Richard Mulonga/IPS

• Is Senegal, an overwhelmingly Muslim West African country, ready to be governed by a woman? Two Women Among 14 Candidates for President

Flashpoints

• Violence, torture and other forms of cruel treatment are on the rise for women in the highlands of Papua New Guinea: Q&A: Where Abusing Women Is ‘An Accepted Norm’

• In India, the alarming case of Baby Falak comes in the wake of a new study indicating that the South Asian country is the world’s most dangerous place for girl children: India’s Girl Child Struggles to Survive

• For over 90 years, a law in Argentina has allowed women who become pregnant as a result of rape to have an abortion. However, hospitals often refuse to carry out the procedure, instead referring the women to the justice system: Argentine Women Refused Legal Abortions in Cases of Rape