A/HRC/10/11 page 6 women have revealed highly significant country and community specific information about the lives of minority women, which is reflected in the visit reports of the independent expert. They have been vital to a deeper understanding of issues facing minority communities in general. 10. The forums for women have also revealed, over the course of several forums, a number of issues that are common to women from many minority communities. Particular problems are faced by girls in accessing educational institutions and continuing their education through higher levels, especially in highly patriarchal family and community structures. Poverty and discrimination add to the weight of the “burden of family care” shouldered by most women. Minority women, whose families are most often extended ones, find those burdens particularly constraining. Heightened levels of domestic violence and physical assaults in public places, coupled with a multifaceted denial of access to justice have been common complaints heard from women from marginalized minority communities. They also face blockages within their homes and communities that deny them a role in decision-making. In the larger society they are denied a voice in decisions of the national polity because they are women and because they are minorities. IV. ACTIVITIES TO COOPERATE WITH EXISTING UNITED NATIONS BODIES, MANDATES, MECHANISMS AND REGIONAL ORGANIZATIONS 11. Article 9 of the Declaration on the Rights of Persons Belonging to National or Ethnic, Religious and Linguistic Minorities reminds the specialized agencies and other organizations of the United Nations system that they are to contribute to the full realization of the rights and principles set forth in the Declaration within their respective fields. Additionally, the independent expert’s mandate requires her “to cooperate closely, while avoiding duplication, with existing relevant United Nations bodies, mandates, mechanisms as well as regional organizations”. In her initial report to the sixty-second session of the Commission on Human Rights, the independent expert said that in carrying out this aspect of her mandate, she “will explore possible means of collaboration with other United Nations bodies and specialized agencies whenever their work bears on her mandate. She will consult with these bodies to share information and strengthen understanding and capacity in regard to minority issues, as appropriate to their specialist fields of activity and programmes of work”. A. Collaboration with the United Nations Development Programme: minorities, poverty and development processes 12. The independent expert has developed a fruitful collaboration with UNDP. Her first thematic report (A/HRC/4/9) was on minorities, poverty alleviation strategies and the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), in which she stated that: “The poorest communities in almost any region tend to be minority communities that have been targets of long-standing discrimination, violence or exclusion. As such, poverty within minority communities must be viewed as both a cause and a manifestation of the diminished rights, opportunities, and social advancement available to the members of that community as a whole. Without a targeted focus on their needs and rights, they will remain disproportionately impoverished. And without a more coherent effort to reduce poverty through targeted strategies that specifically reach out to minority communities, the international community will fail to achieve, or sustain, the important targets set within the Millennium Development Goals.”