International Women’s Day 2026 Event Recap

This year, the UN Women theme for IWD was Balance the Scales, to ensure fair, inclusive, and accessible justice for every woman and girl in the world.

Our first event for the year was ONLINE and in celebration of International Women’s Day.

WiAD Board Director, Jill Scanlon, shares a recap of the event below.

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On the Tuesday evening following International Women’s Day in March, WiAD hosted three brilliant guest speakers who brought to the table a significant breadth and depth of knowledge and experience about the plight of women facing a lack of fair, inclusive and accessible justice globally.

Jules Frost, the CEO of Hagar International, a global organisation working to end human trafficking, slavery, and abuse, was joined by Debbie Stothard, founder of ALTSEAN and more pointedly ALTSEAN Burma, and by Noor Azizah, an outstanding young Rohingya woman working as a human rights advocate for other Rohingya women through her role as Executive Director of Rohingya Maìyafuìnor Collaborative Network (RMCN).

All three women are working through their organisations to reduce and eliminate violence and exploitation and to provide women and girls with fair and equitable access to justice.

The work of both Noor and Debbie is focused on the plight of the Rohingya, with Noor noting that Debbie has been both a mentor and guiding light for her work in this area. Among some of their key messages, both women spoke fervently about the importance of grassroots-led advocacy and leadership from the Rohingya women in fighting for justice for themselves. Noor’s work running workshops within the world's largest refugee settlement, underlines her efforts directly with those women being impacted, while Debbie spoke about local women drafting policies, as a form of advocacy in action, to drive the message at a practical level to those in power, underlining the message that “Every Structure of power is not all powerful”.

Jules Frost brought the perspective of a global organisation that works to address these injustices at the operational and legal level, looking at the structural drivers of exploitation. She too spoke to the need for a focus on survivor-centred practice with locally led solutions – especially in enlightening those at both judicial and government level about the impact of these exploitation and rights violations; giving examples where small, positive steps are evident in moving the mindsets of those in power, to address these violations at the root, whether that be in people trafficking or modern slavery practices. But still a long fight ahead to fully address and overcome these issues.

It was a fascinating, enlightening and even sometimes disturbing evening of information, stories and discussion with those attending clearly absorbed in the content from the speakers.

You can watch the full IWD event here.————————————————————————————————————————————

A massive thank you to all of our amazing speakers and all those who attended.

We cannot wait to see you all at our upcoming events later this year.