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Every year, the world's largest gathering on gender equality convenes at United Nations Headquarters in New York. This year, the 70th Session of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW70 ) brought together governments, civil society, UN agencies, and grassroots movements from across the globe from 9 to 19 March 2026 to address one of the most urgent questions of our time: how do we ensure that justice for women and girls is not just promised, but delivered?
The priority theme of CSW70 was: "Ensuring and strengthening access to justice for all women and girls, including by promoting inclusive and equitable legal systems, eliminating discriminatory laws, policies and practices, and addressing structural barriers."
For GROOTS Kenya, a national movement of over 5,000 grassroots women-led community organizations, this theme wasn't abstract. It was the daily lived reality of the women we walk alongside. And so we showed up. Not as spectators, but as speakers. Not just to observe the conversation, but to shape it.
Here is how GROOTS Kenya showed up at CSW70.
GROOTS Kenya participated in four speaking engagements across in-person and online side events at CSW70, represented by our Executive Director, our Programs Manager, and two Grassroots Champions for Transformative Development whose voices carried the weight of thousands of community women who could not be in that room.
Tuesday, 17 March 2026
At a UN Women-hosted side event titled "Centering Women's Voices: Citizen Data for Protection and Justice," our Executive Director, Eunice Mwangi, took to the floor to speak on one of the most powerful and most overlooked tools in the fight for gender justice: citizen-generated data.
[UN Women Side Event | Speaker: Eunice Mwangi, Executive Director]
Despite decades of global commitments to gender equality, significant gender data gaps persist. When women's realities are not reflected in official data, they remain invisible in the budgets, policies, and legal systems that are supposed to serve them. Citizen data collected, owned, and used by communities themselves is how grassroots women are closing that gap.
Eunice spoke directly to the realities of land rights in Kenya, where land is classified under the 2010 Constitution into three categories: public, private, and community land. For grassroots women, each of these categories carries a distinct burden:
Her central message was clear: when women collect data, they expose injustice and demand accountability. At GROOTS Kenya, we are working alongside grassroots women to turn lived realities into evidence and that evidence into advocacy that influences policy, strengthens accountability and advances justice.
[UN Women Side Event | Speaker: Eunice Mwangi, Executive Director]
Eunice also spoke at a UN Women side event reflecting on ten years of the Women Count Programme a global initiative that has transformed how gender data is produced and used. Since its launch in 2016, the Women Count programme has been driving a shift in how gender statistics are prioritized and applied to advance meaningful change in the lives of women and girls, backed by over USD 80 million in investment.
Representing GROOTS Kenya, Eunice spoke to a persistent truth: for too long, grassroots women have contributed immensely to local economies through agriculture, small enterprises, and unpaid care work yet much of this contribution remains uncounted in formal statistics.
When women's work is invisible in data, the consequences are concrete:
As the saying goes in the world of data: what is not counted, does not count. GROOTS Kenya's participation in the Women Count Programme has been about changing that building the visibility, the evidence, and the institutional voice that grassroots women deserve.
[Side Event hosted by the Government of Kenya & Government of China in partnership with FAO | Speaker: Eunice Mwangi, Executive Director]
Land governance was a thread running through much of GROOTS Kenya's presence at CSW70 and nowhere was it more directly addressed than at this side event co-hosted by the Government of Kenya, the Government of China, and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO).
Titled "Advancing Gender-Responsive Land Governance and Resource Rights: Harnessing Digital Transitions," the event explored how digital innovations and policy reforms can strengthen women's land and resource rights while dismantling the legal and institutional barriers that continue to limit women's access to land, justice, and economic opportunity.
Our Executive Director, Eunice Mwangi, joined a high-level gathering of partners including the European Union in Kenya, the State Department for Gender, the National Land Commission, Oxfam in Africa, the Council of Governors Kenya, Landesa, and the Kenya Land Alliance (KLA) a constellation of actors reflecting the cross-sectoral effort required to make gender-responsive land governance a reality.
For grassroots women, land is never merely property. It is the foundation of livelihoods, dignity, climate resilience, and intergenerational security. A woman who cannot own or inherit land cannot build a home, access credit, or weather a drought. She cannot pass security to her children. Digital tools from community mapping platforms to electronic land registries hold real promise for making women's land rights visible, verifiable, and enforceable. But only if the policies and institutions behind them are designed with women's realities in mind.
Eunice brought GROOTS Kenya's grassroots evidence to that table: the stories of women whose names are absent from land titles, widows displaced from family property, and communities using citizen-led mapping to reclaim what is rightfully theirs.
[Virtual Side Event hosted by Rights and Resources Initiative (RRI) & IIED | Speaker: Njoki Macharia, GROOTS Kenya Grassroots Champion, Laikipia County]
In a virtual side event titled "Rethinking Power and Women's Leadership," hosted jointly by the Rights and Resources Initiative (RRI) and the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED), GROOTS Kenya was represented by Njoki Macharia a grassroots champion from Laikipia County who took the global stage to speak about what transformative leadership actually looks like when it is rooted in community.
The session spotlighted the role of women leaders in advancing rights, representation, and justice within their communities not from the top down, but from the ground up. Njoki's presence was itself an argument: that the women who understand land rights most intimately are the ones who live on contested land, farm it, lose access to it, and fight to reclaim it. They are not waiting for leadership to arrive. They are the leaders.
Her participation was a reminder that rethinking power means more than reshuffling who sits at the table. It means asking whose knowledge shapes the agenda, whose experience defines the problem, and whose strategies get resourced and scaled
[IIED Online Side Event | Speakers: Doris Munyingi, Programs Manager
Our Programs Manager, Doris Munyingi, and Grassroots Champion Njoki Macharia participated in an online side event hosted by the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED), titled "From land rights to a gender-just economy: lessons from Indigenous and pastoralist women."
The event brought together grassroots leaders and civil society organizations from across Africa and Latin America to share lessons on advancing women's land rights and economic justice a conversation that is deeply grounded in the communities GROOTS Kenya serves every day.
Across many communities in Kenya and beyond, women rely on land and natural resources as the foundation of their livelihoods. Yet structural barriers cultural, legal, and institutional continue to block women's access to ownership, control, and decision-making over those same resources. Doris shared insights from GROOTS Kenya's grassroots movement on how community-led advocacy is confronting these barriers and building pathways to more equitable land governance and economic participation.
[CSW70 Side Event | Speaker: Wairimu Kanyiri, Grassroots Champion for Transformative Development]
Perhaps the most powerful voice GROOTS Kenya brought to CSW70 was that of Wairimu Kanyiri a grassroots champion for transformative development who stood in one of the world's most high-profile policy spaces and spoke the truth that too often gets filtered out before it reaches those rooms.
Drawing from her lived experience as a grassroots leader, Wairimu spoke to why it matters deeply and urgently for women at the community level to have a seat at the table where global decisions are made. Policies shaped without the voices of those most affected by them miss the real issues women face every day. They produce commitments that look good on paper and leave communities unchanged.
She also named a painful truth: many women's issues around leadership, gender-based violence, and justice are still handled informally and unjustly in community spaces. Sometimes quite literally under trees, where decisions are made without proper protection, accountability, or recourse for the women involved.
For Wairimu, attending CSW70 was not merely an act of representation. It was an act of responsibility to carry grassroots realities into global spaces, and to ensure they shape global solutions.
Her words were a reminder that the real measure of spaces like CSW is not how many grassroots women can see in, but how much of their reality can be heard.
Why CSW70 Mattered and What GROOTS Kenya Brought to It
This year's CSW was notable beyond the content of its discussions. For the first time in the Commission's 70-year history, the Agreed Conclusions were adopted by recorded vote rather than consensus 37 in favour, 1 against, and 6 abstentions a reflection of the geopolitical tensions surrounding women's rights in the current global moment. That this outcome was still achieved is a testament to the determination of the majority of Member States to uphold commitments to gender equality.
Against this backdrop, civil society voices were not a footnote. They were essential.
GROOTS Kenya's contribution at CSW70 was the insistence that global frameworks on justice, data, and land rights are only as strong as their connection to the communities they are meant to serve. Citizen data rooted in grassroots realities. Land rights measured against the lives of widows and women farmers. Justice judged not by what laws say, but by what women experience.
We went to New York as a movement. We returned with renewed purpose: to keep building the evidence, the advocacy and the solidarity that grassroots women in Kenya and across the world deserve.
