It is hard to miss the irony in convening in one of the largest metropolitan areas in the world and the summum of big city life that is New York, to discuss women and girls living in rural areas.

Rural women and their empowerment to achieve gender equality is the central theme of the 2018 annual meeting of the UN Commission on the Status of Women in New York.

For the next two weeks, the United Nations will be focusing on women and girls at the sixty-second Commission on the Status of Women which is now underway in New York.