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Marking the International Women's Day, crowds of New York citizens joined a UN-sponsored march for gender equality on Sunday to voice support for strengthening women's rights worldwide.
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon led the march, and women, young girls, as well as men holding posters calling for women's rights joined the crowd, marching from the Dag Hammarskjold Plaza in front of the UN headquarters to Times Square in New York City.
Addressing the event, Ban said it has been 20 years since world leaders approved the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, a global pledge to support women, and "progress has been too slow, uneven."
"I'm asking that all the women -- they must be at the front and center of our world," he told the crowd.
In the march, Juan Lozano, a teenage male student, told Xinhua that "as young people, we believe that the next generation should believe in gender equality, and we should start fresh with everyone being equal."
Musaka Chioufya, a young girl who came to the march with her mother, said "I want to stand for women's rights," and "I want to have a peaceful world where everybody is happy."
The girl's mother, Fota Samakai told Xinhua "for the parade, I brought my daughter, because it's kind of giving them awareness to learn from the beginning that this is what we suppose to do -- stand for rights."
The year 2015 marks the 20th anniversary of the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, in which 189 countries adopted the Beijing Declaration and Platform of Action, pledging to remove obstacles to women's active participation in all spheres of public and private life through a full and equal share in economic, social, cultural and political decision-making.
This year, the International Women's Day highlights the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, said the UN women, vowing to step it up to empower women and girls worldwide for a transformative post-2015 development agenda which will be adopted later this year. Enditem
