such as women in geosciences, gender relations in water management decision making, geo conservation and tourism, empowering people for living tourism, sanitation, participatory planning and management of water resources in urban centers. She shared some of the publications and courses offered by the Chair, on environmental socioeconomic sustainability, experience of women from geosciences in the job market and courses such as craft soap manufacturing for the protection of water resources and assistance in combating Covid-19, for the Latin American community, with the support from UNESCO and IHP-LAC. Prof. Boshra Mossad Awad, UNESCO Chair through Empowerment of Women in Science and Technology, Egypt, focused on successful ways to empower women through science and technology during the Covid-19 pandemic. She presented a number of initiatives developed during the lockdown, including projects to reach out to girls staying at home, establishing good quality online learning platforms and distributing free electronic devices and learning materials. Her work has benefited communities in rural Egypt, moving from eLearning to mobile learning. For women’s capacity building, compulsory courses have been introduced in faculty programs, already showing positive results on girls and society. “My recommendation is to develop a website for networking between the gender-related UNESCO Chairs, for fruitful, borderless collaboration, and exchange experiences, visions, unite voices, and spark momentum for addressing challenges, and for building the most bright future for all women across the globe. I appreciate this Summit very much. It is very promising and we hope to do brighter work together for women, hand in hand, crossing all boundaries and challenges”. Dr. Fotini Bellou, UNESCO Chair women, peace and security Building Capacity and Resilience through Education and Research, Greece, focuses on policy agenda related to women peace and security. Her Chair’s objectives include: empowerment and protection of women throughout the spectrum of policies related to crisis management and conflict
resolution; promotion of a comprehensive system of research education knowledge and documentation on Women, Peace and Security; cooperation at national and international levels, and establishing an interdisciplinary hub for collaborative research. She emphasized how Covid-19 has unveiled the need for accelerating our efforts and how we should exploit and capitalize on the issues and the collaboration that the pandemic has generated. She also introduced major events, activities and collaborations of her Chair. “Our suggestions and vision out of this conference is to launch collaboration schemes to promote research on different kind of areas; promote advocacy for increasing the role of women in International Organizations; make the gender network visible - Covid-19 has made us think wider and in a more inclusive fashion, for these reasons, it has brought an upheaval in international relations and we are open to new ideas. For this reason, making this network visible as well as the UNESCO global network on gender equality more visible to our societies is needed although a very challenging issue”.
S es s i o n 2 Dr. Barbara Pozzo presented the work of the UNESCO Chair in Italy, focusing on Gender Equality and Women’s Rights in the Multicultural Society. One of the objectives of the Chair is to develop and improve knowledge and awareness of women’s rights in Italy; remove gender biases in the broader context of multicultural society, which are often based on lack of knowledge and preparation from a historical cultural point of view. The activities conducted include law courses on the evolution of women’s rights in a comparative, historical and anthropological perspective, seminars and conferences in collaboration with PhD in law and social sciences, with a focus on sexual harassment in the workplace, stereotypes in advertising, projects with and for women in jail and women migrants in shelters, and national and international collaborations, including with the Global Network of UNESCO Chairs in higher education. She concluded by emphasizing the need to develop an awareness raising process 9
