🌹 Bread and Roses, a Symbol of Solidarity
The origin of International Women’s Peace Day goes back to March 8, 1908, on the streets of New York. At that time, female laborers went out to the streets to demand ‘bread (the right to survival)’ and ‘roses (suffrage)’.

Their courage contributed significantly in raising public awareness on gender equality and women’s rights, leading to the official designation of International Women’s Day by the UN in 1977, which the world celebrates up to this day. But sharing roses to commemorate the day was not enough. Women needed a working channel to translate their voices into real policies and action.

🏛️ CSW, the World’s Biggest Forum for Women
The UN Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) is a UN body that shares goals and agendas regarding women. It was established in 1946, a year after the launch of the UN, making it the oldest UN body related to women’s empowerment in politics, economics, society, and education. Every March the CSW holds an annual forum in the UN Headquarters in New York. The International Women’s Peace Day is a symbolic day celebrating women’s rights, while the CSW is a global forum to discuss tangible actions for the cause.

⚖️ 2026’s Theme: Policy as Everyone’s Guardrail
CSW70’s priority theme was “Ensuring and strengthening access to justice for all women and girls.” This year’s CSW invited in-depth discussion on the following topics:

✨ Peace Blooms through Engagement
A world where women’s rights are protected and women are guaranteed equal rights under the law does not mean a world that benefits only one specific gender. It is strengthening the weakest link in our society and the only path toward true and lasting peace.

This March, IWPG hopes that a small seed of transformation takes root in everyone’s heart. IWPG’s newsletter will continue to convey these voices of encouragement so that all women can fulfill their dreams in a safe and equal world.

IWPG participated in UN CSW70 from March 6 to 18 and presented a roadmap for peace led by women and built governance partnerships with 20 government officials, international institutions, and NGOs.

The launch of IWPG’s new campaign “PLACE” was also notable. Standing for “Peace as Lived And Connected Experience,” this peace archiving program was first presented to next generation female leaders at Columbia University. IWPG also presented research findings involving women from five conflict-affected countries, demonstrating that the PLACE campaign is grounded not only in vision but also in data-driven outcomes.

IWPG expanded its spectrum by building strategical partnerships with national governments, international institutions, and various CSOs, including the Office of the Presidential Adviser on Peace, Reconciliation and Unity of the Philippines (OPAPRU); the Ministry of Women Empowerment and Child Protection (MoWECP) of Indonesia; the Australian Human Rights Commission (AHRC); UN Women Iceland; the Ministry of Community Development and Social Services of Zambia; the Ministry of Women, Family, and Children of Côte d’Ivoire; and DIRCO and DWYPD of South Africa.

In addition, IWPG signed MOUs with ASNA (Nigeria), HDA (Lebanon), and SHAD (Egypt), while also meeting KADEM (Türkiye), the Global Network of Women Peacebuilders (GNWP), AIESEC, FIMI (Peru), and Voice for Change (Papua New Guinea).

IWPG Chairwoman Jeon Na-yeong said, “In 2025 alone, there were more than 200,000 recorded conflict events around the world, and even now so many women are losing hopes for the future. IWPG will continue to work to ensure that all women enjoy peaceful lives by helping women’s actions and solidarity become cultural practices that ultimately lead to institutional change.”

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