A Side Event at CSW70 | Conference Room 8, UN Headquarters, New York | Friday, 13 March 2026 | 4:45 PM – 6:00 PM EST
Across East Africa, millions of women and girls share a version of this story.
They are victims of gender-based violence.
They are vulnerable women stripped of land by discriminatory inheritance laws.
They are young girls pushed out of school and into early marriage, their futures narrowed by harmful patriarchal norms.
They are women whose voices have been silenced by structural barriers that often feel impossible to dismantle.
But impossible is not the same as permanent.
And this Friday, in Conference Room 8 at the United Nations Headquarters in New York, stories of change will take center stage.
What the Event Seeks to Achieve
The 70th Session of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW70) is convening world leaders, civil society organisations, development partners, and women with lived experience of injustice under a powerful mandate: to strengthen access to justice for all women and girls and eliminate the discriminatory laws, policies, and practices that continue to hold them back.
Into that global conversation steps HAGURUKA, alongside the Ministry of Gender and Family Promotion of Rwanda (MIGEPROF), FIDA Uganda, and the Feminist Africa Network (FEMNET). Together, they are convening a 75-minute side event titled: Justice for Her: Power, Policy, and Practice Across the East African Region.
The session will showcase concrete tools, replicable models, landmark legal strategies, and accountability mechanisms that are transforming how women in Rwanda, Uganda, Kenya, and across the African region experience justice not as an abstract principle, but as something a woman can actually reach.
Four Voices, One Commitment
The side event brings together four panelists, each with a a shared commitment to justice for women and girls across East Africa. Together, they will speak from experience, evidence, and conviction.
The side event will open with welcome remarks from Hon. Consolée Uwimana, Minister of Gender and Family Promotion of the Republic of Rwanda. Her remarks will ground the conversation in Rwanda’s progressive legal, policy, and institutional framework and the political will that has driven reforms to advance gender equality.
MIGEPROF will speak to what legal and institutional reforms Rwanda has implemented to improve women’s access to justice, including Rwanda’s progressive legal, policy and institutional framework and political will, and how the response to access to justice is shaped at the government institutional level — through National Gender Machineries, MINIJUST, MINALOC, RIB, Isange Centres, and beyond.
HAGURUKA will present localized solutions and innovative legal aid approaches and services for access to justice for women and girls —the HAGURUKA Model — showcasing the strategies and models used in ensuring access to justice for women and children, the HAGURUKA partnership model with key Government of Rwanda ministries and departments, and networking and collaboration with various stakeholders within civil society, communities, and norm-shift actors.
FIDA Uganda will share what feminist legal strategies and litigation approaches have proven effective in advancing justice for women and girls in Uganda, including best practices such as strategic litigation, investment in community justice systems and collaboration with ministries and the judiciary, intersectionality and how these play out — not leaving anyone behind (young people, persons with disabilities, and other minorities) , lessons learnt on engaging men and boys as allies, and strengthened collaboration with like-minded actors at national and regional levels.
FEMNET will examine, from its locus as a Pan-African feminist organisation, how regional feminist advocacy influences justice systems and policy reform across Africa — looking at legal advancements in the East African Region, access to justice from legal and administrative perspectives, and the work of Court Users Committees in Kenya, among others.
The event will close with the adoption of a Joint Call to Action: a set of clear, time-bound commitments by governments, donors, and civil society to advance women’s access to justice , not only for the duration of CSW70, but beyond it.
Join us. Conference Room 8, UN Headquarters, New York. Friday, 13 March 2026. 4:45 PM EST.
Register here: bit.ly/4kDIJut
“She walked three hours to reach the nearest legal aid office. She was not sure the law could help her but she came anyway. She came because someone, somewhere, had told her that she had rights.” This is one of the stories that will be shared during the event.