Nominations Open for the 19th Outstanding Women’s Award by National Women’s Commission

The National Women’s Commission (NWC) is officially welcoming nominations for the 19th Outstanding Women’s Award. The purpose of the award is to recognize women across the country who have given back to the community. Programme Officer at NWC, Eleanor Murillo, spoke about the nomination criteria that must be met. 

Eleanor Murillo, Program Officer, NWC: “As the advisory monitoring reporting body to government on issues of gender equality we thought that it would be good for us to use the critical areas from the Beijing platform for action. And the Beijing platform is really the advancing of women’s rights. And so government, Belize and all the countries who have signed on to the Beijing have to report on areas that they have advanced women’s rights in their country. And so just to name the areas we have women in the environment, power and decision-making, the girl child which means someone under the age of 17 years, women and the economy, women and poverty, those institutions who have done great work, government, NGOs, whether it’s a business. I know in the past we know that a hotel who have really done outstanding work in terms of empowering their workers they were awarded one year. So it’s not just women individually, but also institutions, organizations, businesses who help to advance women’s rights. Education, that’s another area, the women in education, women in health, women in the media. So even the media houses can also submit, you know, an outstanding woman who has gone beyond the call of duty in terms of advancing women’s rights, women in uniform services and so on. So we have these areas that we look at and so these are the people that we want to really award this year.”

Nominators are asked to submit a 250-word essay about the nominee along with a picture of the nominee by Friday. The selected women will be awarded on March 21.