As the 58th Session of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW58) approaches, UN Women has highlighted the major problems that continue to face women and girls and the need for increased attention to be paid to tackling them after the Millennium Development Goals.
"Lack of access to drinking water continues to exacerbate the burden of water collection for many women and young girls; women are grossly under-represented in national parliaments; and almost 800 women are still dying every day during child-birth as the target to reduce maternal mortality remains unmet", states the UN Women media briefing.
Over 50 Soroptimist International delegates will attend CSW58 in New York from 10-21 March, along with representatives of 860 civil society organisations from around the world. During the annual meeting, UN Member States will closely examine the gaps and the achievements made since 2000 under this year’s priority theme of ‘Challenges and achievements in the implementation of the MDGs for women and girls’. The meeting will be an important milestone in the ongoing debate about the Post-2015 development agenda, and Soroptimist International will be joining UN Women, AWID and other NGOs in promoting the centrality of women’s empowerment and gender equality throughout the fortnight.
“The Commission is an opportunity to bring global attention to the fact that the realization of women’s and girls’ human rights is far from being achieved and needs increased attention and action to achieve the MDGs. There is rising political commitment to a stand-alone goal focusing on women and girls in the post-2015 development agenda and we hope to make further progress at this CSW session,” said Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, UN Women Executive Director.
The Millennium Development Goals have played an important role in galvanizing attention on and resources for gender equality and women’s empowerment, but progress has been uneven. Important gains have been made, for instance in girls’ access to primary education, but overall advancement for women and girls has been mixed, and fallen short of expectations. Advancement also varies dramatically from country to country, and for the most marginalized groups.
The Commission on the Status of Women is expected to reiterate that effective implementation of the MDGs for women and girls requires renewed efforts to advance gender equality. This must include strong political will to ensure concrete steps towards gender-responsive institutions, strong governance and accountability systems.
In an official SI statement to CSW58 Soroptimist International sets out five key ways that the MDGs fell short, with proposals for how these could be rectified in the Post-2015 agenda:
1. What you measure significantly impacts on what you do and how resources are distributed. The MDGs did not treat gender as a cross-cutting theme. Indicators for each and every goal should have been disaggregated by sex.
2. Funding and financing were noticeably absent. Of particular importance, there was no mention or requirement to deploy gender-responsive budgeting and gender audits.
3. Accountability mechanisms were weak. Governments, private institutions and other actors must be held to account for their actions or lack thereof. Naming and shaming is not usually enough.
4. Violence against women and girls was not addressed. As we all know that this is one of the primary barriers to achieving gender equality and ensuring women have equal access to resources and security, it is no wonder that the MDGs didn’t achieve what they could have for women and girls.
5. “Gender” has two sides, yet the MDGs focussed solely on women and girls. To truly effect change,attention must be paid to working with men and boys and breaking gender stereotypes for women AND men. We do not want to gauge women’s success by how much their lives look the same as their male counterparts. At the same time, we want men to be able to freely determine the course of their lives without being constrained by male stereotypes. Work on both sides must occur in order to achieve true gender equality.
As well as promoting these key asks at CSW58 and sharing developments and learning from the meeting with Soroptimists worldwide, SI will be running several side-events. For more information about these and regular updates throughout the session, visit our CSW58 page: www.soroptimistinternational.org/CSW58.
More information
UN Women Media Briefing: Development in Jeopardy as Gaps in Progress for Women and Girls persist
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