Women from our communities carry the heaviest burden of inherited exclusion - and have turned it into fuel for transformation.
Through grassroots organising and partnerships with UN Women and global human rights mechanisms, women leaders confront the stigma, forced labour, gender-based violence, child marriage and sexual exploitation that define life for too many women in our communities. They do it not as the subjects of someone else's policy, but as the people shaping the response.
One of those leaders is Dr Simona Torotcoi, a Roma rights advocate from Romania and TIP's UN Programme Specialist for Europe. She holds a PhD in Public Policy from Central European University, and has spent more than a decade working on education, anti-discrimination and the political participation of Roma communities - with the Roma Education Fund, the OSCE Contact Point for Roma and Sinti Issues, and UNICEF among others.
In 2023, women from communities discriminated on work and descent came together as a single delegation at the UN Commission on the Status of Women for the first time - bringing the realities of caste, descent and inherited status into a room that had rarely heard them. That is what it looks like when the women living this reality lead the movement to end it.