After two weeks of intense negotiations, UN Member states at
the 58^th Session of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW58) have
issued a strong statement that gender equality
and women’s rights must be central to the development agenda that succeeds the
Millennium Development Goals.

“The agreement represents
a milestone towards a transformative global development agenda that puts the
empowerment of women and girls at its centre”, said Phumzile Mlambo Ngcuka,
 Executive Director of UN Women.  “Member
States have stressed that while the Millennium Development Goals have advanced progress in many areas, they remain unfinished business as
long as gender inequality persists.”

Soroptimist International welcomes the final agreement,  while remaining concerned about continuing attempts by some Governments to backtrack on previously agreed positions and compromise women’s human rights in the name of culture, tradition or religion.

"There is much analysis to be done but general feeling seems to be
that we, the representatives of the women of the world, have only just
managed to hold a line, that there are a lot of ‘asks’ which are missing
from the text, and there will be a lot to do to get women and girls as a
priority into the post 2015 agenda and discussions, although it has
been agreed that gender equality should be mainstreamed into the next
set of Goals", writes Pat Black, Immediate Past-President of the SIGBI Federation in an update for the SIGBI website.

Negotiations on key areas of the text
of the final document continued until late into the evening on Friday 21^st
March and the vote on the final “compromise” draft agreement did not take place
until nearly midnight. Some Governments, including Egypt and Mexico, and the EU
expressed concern that the language in the document was not strong enough,
while the African Union stated
that although they were in favour of equality and rights for women, they had
reservations including definitions of family and sexuality education for
children.  Argentina, Australia, Brazil & the US regretted that the
document did not include reference to sexual orientation and gender identify.

In our official position statement for CSW, Soroptimist International identified five key
ways that the MDGs fell short for women and girls and how these areas could be
better addressed in the Post-2015 agenda that succeeds them. Over 50
Soroptimist delegates were in New York for CSW58 to help get these key messages
across to decision-makers and many of our recommendations were reflected in the
final text.  

Soroptimist International’s full analysis of
the final agreement will be available soon.

Read more Soroptimist updates from CSW58

UN Women: Phumzile
Mlambo Ngcuka’s full statement  

Guardian: Campaigners welcome ‘milestone’ agreement at UN
gender equality talks

Al Jazeera: UN document on equality for women
publish