Photo: Opening of the High-level Segment of ECOSOC (UN Photo/Paulo Filgueiras)

Soroptimist International is
setting out its vision for the Post-2015 development agenda at the key annual
meeting of the UN’s Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), taking place in New
York this week. In official written and oral interventions to ECOSOC’s High
Level Segment, SI identifies five key priority areas for the post-2015 agenda
to improve the lives of women and girls, and societies as a whole.

“These areas are based on the challenges we
have identified in the MDG framework and implementation, and reflect the voices
of women and girls at grassroots level worldwide” explains SI in its oral statement.  “In
short, they are: improving data collection, working with men and boys as allies
to achieve gender equality, addressing violence against women, developing
accountability mechanisms, and the critical importance of gender-responsive
budgeting”. 

This year’s meeting of ECOSOC  includes a High-Level Political Forum on
Sustainable Development (HLPF), the Annual Ministerial Review (AMR) and
Development Cooperation Forum (DCF).

As a global NGO in General
Consultative Status with ECOSOC, SI is able to submit statements for
consideration by Member States at key meetings. This year, SI had both a
written and oral statement accepted at the High Level Segment, giving two
opportunities to share the voices of Soroptimists worldwide.

“This is an exceptional
accomplishment for SI”, says Reilly Dempsey, SI’s Head of Programme and Advocacy. “The
last time SI had both an oral and written statement selected for the ECOSOC
annual meeting was in 2011. In practice, this meant that SI’s written statement
was chosen by an ECOSOC Selection Committee to be distributed to all government
officials attending the event.  These are
generally high ranking Members of Parliament and Heads of States.” 

SI’s oral statement was also
selected, with Paulette Forbes-Igharo,  SI’s
Lead UN Representative in New York due to deliver it yesterday. Unfortunately, time
was limited so no NGOs were able to deliver oral statements on the
day.

 

Photo: Lead UN Rep in New York Paulette, who was due to deliver SI’s oral statement

“Paulette was ready but the
moderator did not allow civil society organisations to make a statement- only
the member states’ representatives were able to express opinions or participate
in discussions”, explains UN Rep Angelina Akhvlediani, who has also been
attending the meeting.

Whenever SI is invited or
selected to deliver such a statement, there is always a proviso that it is
conditional on time availability, and member states are given priority during
the discussions. 

Post-2015 Objectives must leave no one behind

Launching the Millennium Development
Goals Report 2014 during the opening
session of the meeting on 7 July, Ban Ki-moon, UN Secretary-General, pointed
out that many key targets had been met or were within reach, but that
achievements had been uneven, with social exclusion and discrimination
remaining great obstacles. “Our post-2015 objectives must be to leave no one
behind”, he emphasised.

While recognising that the MDGs
were groundbreaking, SI highlights key shortcomings for women and girls,
including:

• failing
  to address structural inequalities,
  the underlying causes of  poorer outcomes
  for women;
• not
  treating gender as a cross-cutting theme
  – what you measure significantly impacts on what you do, so indicators for
  every goal should have been disaggregated by sex;
• absence
  of funding and financing; in
  particular, there was no mention or requirement to deploy gender-responsive
  budgeting and gender audits.
• weak accountability mechanisms; all involved
  actors, in particular governments and private institutions, must be held to
  account. Much more work needs to be done to link development goals to legally
  binding human rights in order to improve accountability.
• Violence against women and girls was not addressed. This is one of the
  primary barriers to achieving gender equality and ensuring women have equal
  access to resources.
• MDGs
  focussed solely on women and girls, but to truly effect change, attention must
  be paid to working with men and boys
  and breaking gender stereotypes for women AND men.

SI continues to capitalise and
optimise our general consultative status at the UN to input into the formation
of the Post-2015 Development Agenda at major events throughout 2014 and 2015
and through the work of our UN Representatives on committees and major
groups. 

Read SI’s full written statement andoral statement to ECOSOC High Level Segment.