Ebtekar made the remarks in the Ministerial Roundtable of the UN. The full text of her speech follows:
It's an honor for me to take part in this ministerial roundtable. In Sept. 2017, the President of the Islamic Republic of Iran, President Rouhani decreed that 30% of decision-making posts in the government should be allocated to women. This decree paved the way and the grounds for the presence of women in different levels of government decision-making posts.
Every year, after this decree, we provided a scorecard for both ministers and governors of each province, so that we could actually measure the advancement that we had in terms of promoting women at different levels of management in our government, and also we promoted training courses and schemes for women at different levels of government working on their management skills and this enabled the government to increase the participation of women at different levels particularly 8000 new woman directors and managers entered in decision-making processes at different levels including about 96 women at the level of deputy ministers, 16 women at the level of deputy governors and also ambassadors and at many ministries, we see women taking important posts at deciding-making processes in our country.
So we moved from about 5% woman managers about 7 years ago to 25% today, and we are still moving ahead and we are hoping to achieve 30% quota soon.
Another area that is very important for both participation and decision-making in our society is civil society. The capacity building for the NGOs has been underway in our country.
We have 2700 NGOs focused on women and families and we have been working for training schemes for these NGOs. 1000 NGOs have been trained in regional workshops before the pandemic and a thousand other NGOs have received online training after the pandemic, all empowering these NGOs to play a more proactive role in our civil society and also we have many projects with these NGOs underway promoting their goals in different dimensions of our social development.