Conference of United Nations Women's Decade Meets in Nairobi

The World Conference on Women, 1985, held in Nairobi, Kenya, was the third in a series of global gatherings organized by the United Nations to assess progress in achieving gender equality and to set further goals. Known as the Nairobi World Conference, it marked the end of the UN Decade for Women (1976–1985) and was attended by delegates from over 150 countries. This conference was significant not only for evaluating the implementation of the goals set at the previous conferences in Mexico City (1975) and Copenhagen (1980), but also for producing the Nairobi Forward-looking Strategies for the Advancement of Women—a comprehensive plan that addressed the continued struggle for women's rights around the globe. The Nairobi Conference was pivotal in shifting global discourse from seeing women's issues solely as "women's problems" to recognizing them as human rights and development challenges. It emphasized the need to integrate women more fully into economic and political systems and paid particular attention to issues affecting women in the Global South. The strategies adopted in Nairobi addressed key areas such as education, health, employment, and the impact of armed conflict on women. The 1985 conference also helped build a stronger international network of women’s organizations and set the stage for the more ambitious and transformative agenda that would follow a decade later at the 1995 Beijing Conference.