The meeting organised by the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) will bring together national planners, decision makers, members of the SAARC secretariat, key NGOs, experts, activists and collaborating United Nations agencies.

The meeting will be followed by a two-day session on `Mainstreaming Gender' where delegates will deliberate on how gender biases can be eliminated in national development plans. Delegates are expected to come out with a joint regional strategy on making plan processes more gender responsive.

Commemorating Beijing will facilitate sharing of the post-Beijing activities in Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. This will include exchanging experiences, learning frombest practices, identifying gaps and charting out actions for the future with respect to the Beijing consensus.

As a step towards fulfilling commitments made at the Beijing Conference all South Asian countries have ratified the Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), National Plans of Action have been drawn up, and significant steps have been taken to incorporate gender sensitivity in policies, programmes, plans and political legal and economic institutions.

For instance, Nepal has set up its first Ministry of Women and Social Welfare to formulate national policies on women and to integrate these into the country's national development policy.

India has put into process several initiatives to implement the Beijing Platform of Action. These include the Indira Mahila Yojna to promote women's self help groups, the universalisation of mother and child care services (the ICDS) throughout the country, the setting up of a Parliamentary Committee for the Empowermentof Women and making women's empowerment an objective of the Ninth Plan.

The Government of India and the United Nations system are also actively involved in efforts towards engendering the forthcoming Census 2001 to reflect a more realistic and true record of women's work and contribution to the national economy.

Commemorating Beijing at Kathmandu is the second of the biennial regional reviews organised by UNIFEM as part of its mandate of keeping the Beijing flame burning by facilitating follow up of commitments made by national decision makers and representatives of civil society to continue the process of sustaining a transparent dialogue between the various actors of development.

The stock taking will build into the Beijing Plus 5 planned for the year 2000, which will be a global review of progress in the first five years after the Beijing conference.

At the Kathmandu conference special efforts will be made to enhance networking and regional collaboration on the Critical Areas of Concerns identifiedat the Beijing conference.

These will include women and poverty, unequal access to education and health, violence against women, effects of armed and other kinds of conflict, inequality between men and women in sharing of power and decision making, insufficient mechanisms to promote advancement of women, stereotyping of women in communication systems and specially in the media, gender inequalities in the management of natural resources and in safeguarding the environment and persistent discrimination against the rights of the girl child.