On International Women’s Day, IPS news agency talks to Iranian Nobel Prize Winner Shirin Ebadi and new UNESCO Director General Irina Bokova about their efforts to champion women. Both are in New York, with thousands of others, to review what progress women have made since the landmark Beijing Conference on Women, fifteen years ago.

An international team of IPS reporters is in New York where the U.N. Commission on the Status of Women is meeting to review the Beijing Platform of Action, with the IPS global network contributing local voices and viewpoints. Read more »

Fifteen years after the Beijing World Conference on Women, IPS remains committed to in-depth reporting on progress achieved and challenges facing women and girls.

IPS has a long-standing editorial commitment to mainstreaming gender, which it has realised through training, editorial guidelines and targeted projects.

On the occasion of the 54th session of the U.N. Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) in New York (1 - 12 March), an international team of journalists will provide special coverage from New York through the IPS TerraViva Beijing+15 website. Read more »

Mario Lubetkin, IPS Director General met the Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and Carlos Roberto Tiburcio de Oliveira, special advisor to the Brazilian Presidency General Secretariat and his country’s representative to the IPS Core Group. This was the first meeting between IPS and the Brazilian Government after the recent election of Brazil as the Chair of the IPS Core Group of Donors.

The Brazilian Government convoked an informal meeting in Rome, held on 25 and 26 November inviting South and emerging countries of the G-20, plus Venezuela and Qatar for their initiatives in the field of communication (Al-Jazeera and Telesur). The meeting was supported by IPS, and aimed to strengthen the role of information and communication as Southern and emerging countries gain space and power in the new political scenario. Participants agreed on the need to identify common areas of work in the field of information and laid out a plan for 2010 to continue this process.

BANGKOK - Do media organisations in the Mekong Region think that gender sensitivity, including giving voices to women, is part of doing better stories? How do they define it within the context of their societies and how do they report on different genders and sexuality? Do they include the use of gender-friendly language in their stylebooks and training programmes? How much is using a gender lens a news habit?

These are some of the questions asked by ‘Talking Gender in the Mekong Media’, a report that IPS Asia-Pacific (www.ipsnewsasia.net) carried out as part of the IPS network’s ‘Communicating for Change’ project, in order to help identify areas for future news work and capacity-building, as well some practical and professional approaches to doing these. The Communicating for Change project is funded through the Dutch Ministry’s MDG-3 Fund. Read more »

Ten years ago the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre burst onto the world stage giving social movements and civil society the space to challenge the orthodoxies symbolised by the World Economic Forum. IPS global news agency was there, and now in 2010 is launching a year of coverage as World Social Forum 2010 promotes more than 35 global, regional and thematic events during the year, on every continent.

The “IPS TerraViva World Social Forum 2010” online site will provide independent, professional reporting in many languages from as many of the events as possible, along with comment and analysis on the challenges that drive social movements. Will the WSF stay relevant and innovative? Read IPS TerraViva to find out. Read more »