Chilean President Michelle Bachelet during the closing ceremony of the international meeting “Women in power and decision-making: Building a different world”. On the podium, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and U.N. Women Executive Director Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka. Credit: Government of Chile

By Marianela Jarroud
SANTIAGO, Mar 3 2015 (IPS)

Women leaders from every continent, brought together by U.N. Women and the Chilean government, demanded that gender equality be a cross-cutting target in the post-2015 development agenda. Only that way, they say, can the enormous inequality gap that still affects women and children around the world be closed.

“We celebrate that there has been progress in these last twenty years (since the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing) in this area…and the evidence is all the people around who came, shared their experiences, the good, the bad, the struggle ahead, the challenges ahead,” U.N. Women Deputy Executive Director Lakshmi Puri told IPS.

And while “some countries have made no progress at all, some countries, some progress, and some countries better progress, no country has reached what we should need to reach,” she added.“At the current pace of change, it will take 81 years to achieve gender parity in the workplace, more than 75 years to reach equal remuneration between men and women for work of equal value, and more than 30 years to reach gender balance in decision-making.” – Santiago Call to Action

“If you’re talking about poverty, you need voice, participation and leadership for women, if you’re talking about economy, you need voice and participation, if you’re talking education, you need women – both education for voice, participation and leadership, capacity-building, and you need them to be leaders in education,” she said.

“Similarly health: you want women leaders in the health sector. Just as they need to have a voice in the design of the health sector and services,” said Puri, from India. “Women in the media is another critical area – you need voice, participation and leadership for women in the media, otherwise you will never get past the inequality and the negative stereotyping of women and their role in the media.”

The high-level event, “Women in power and decision-making: Building a different world”, held Feb.27-28 in the Chilean capital, assessed the advances made towards gender equality in the last 20 years and what still needs to be done.

One example raised at the meeting was the failure to reach the goal on gender balance in leadership positions.

The participants also discussed the route forward, towards the Sustainable Development Goals, for the period 2015-2030, designed to close gaps, build more resilient societies, and move towards sustainable prosperity for all.

The SDGs will replace the eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which set out the international community’s collective development and anti-poverty targets for the 2000-2015 period.

The women leaders meeting in Santiago demanded that gender equality be mainstreamed into the 17 projected SDGs to prevent the progress from being slow and uneven, as it has been in the last 20 years in the case of the Beijing Platform for Action agreed at the Fourth World Conference on Women in September 1995.

U.N. Women Deputy Executive Director Lakshmi Puri at the high-level international event “Women in power and decision-making: Building a different world”, held Feb. 27-28 in Santiago, Chile. Credit: Marianela Jarroud/IPS

“At the current pace of change, it will take 81 years to achieve gender parity in the workplace, more than 75 years to reach equal remuneration between men and women for work of equal value, and more than 30 years to reach gender balance in decision-making,” reads the Call to Action document produced by the conference in Santiago, part of the activities marking the 20 years since Beijing.

Puri pointed out that in the future SDGs, number five will promote “gender equality and empowerment of women and girls.”

But she said it is equally important for “the other SDGS to have gender-sensitive targets and indicators that capture on one hand the impacts and needs of women, and that also capture the agency of women,” she said.

“How can you get health for all without health for women and by women and for women; similarly how can you get education for all, and sustainable energy for all. So all of those SDGs are intimately related to this, to the realisation and achievement of the gender equality goal.”

“I was looking at an IPS article about the gender goal which said it is not a wish-list but a to-do list, so then I used it for the call to action (in Santiago),” she said.

The Santiago call to action calls for a renewed political commitment to close remaining gaps and to guarantee full implementation of the 12 critical areas of the Beijing Platform for Action by 2020.

This includes balanced representation of women and men in all international decision-making processes, including the Post-2015 Development Agenda, the SDGs, financing for development and climate change processes.

It also includes the empowerment of women, the realisation of human rights of women and girls, and an end to gender inequality by 2030 and to the funding gap on gender equality, as well as the matching of commitments with means of implementation.

The executive director of Oxfam International, Winnie Byanyima of Uganda, told IPS that in the post-2015 agenda, “gender equality should be measured in all the goals, in other words, each goal must be measured for how it is achieved for men and for women, in different ethnic groups, in cities, in rural areas….so that we will know that each sustainable development goal has been achieved not only for men but also for women, not only for boys but also for girls, rather than averages.”

She stressed that “the technical groups working within…the United Nations must make sure that they select standards and indicators that are going to be measurable in a gender disaggregated way so that all countries are able to collect gender disaggregated data to enable monitoring progress for men and women.”

In the conference’s closing event, Chilean President Michelle Bachelet said that “for those of us who have taken part in this gathering, it is not possible to think of a successful development agenda that does not have at its heart the central aim of achieving equality between boys and girls, and men and women.”

“We need the banner of equality to wave soon in all nations, and we must be optimistic, because we have a real possibility to make every place on earth more humane, more just, more dignified, for each person who lives there,” she said.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

Last year, as rebels captured the main towns in Northern Mali, UN Women registered a sudden and dramatic increase of rapes in the first week of the takeover of Gao and Kidal, in places where most women never report this violence to anyone, not even health practitioners.

Lakshmi Puri. UN Photo/Devra Berkowitz

We heard stories of girls as young as 12 being taken from their homes to military camps, gang-raped for days and subsequently abandoned; of surgery and delivery rooms invaded by armed men enforcing dress codes and occupying health facilities; of young women being punished, flogged, and tortured for bearing children outside of marriage.

This week, the United Nations Security Council heard similar atrocities from other parts of the globe, and adopted its fourth resolution in only five years exclusively devoted to the issue of sexual violence in armed conflict. A crime that was until recently invisible, ignored, or dismissed as an inevitable consequence of war is now routinely addressed by the world body in charge of the maintenance of international peace and security.

And this is not the only policy gain achieved in the last few months to turn violence against women from a pandemic into an aberration.

In March, the Commission on the Status of Women, the principal global policy-making body dedicated to furthering the rights of women, reached a historic agreement on violence against women. This forward-looking declaration commits member states to actions that were never before so explicitly articulated in international documents, including in conflict and post-conflict situations.

In April, a new Arms Trade Treaty was adopted by the U.N. General Assembly, requiring exporting state parties to consider the risks of arms being used “to commit or facilitate serious acts of gender-based violence or violence against women.”

That same month, the Special Representative of the Secretary-General on Sexual Violence against Conflict named and shamed perpetrators of this crime in her annual report to the Security Council. In addition, the world’s eight richest nations reached a historic agreement to work together to end sexual violence in conflict. Under the presidency of the United Kingdom, the G8 agreed on six major steps to tackle impunity and pledged over 35 million dollars in new funding.

This sample of policy developments parallels rising demands to advance women’s empowerment and gender equality and say no to violence against women. This year began with mass protests in every major city in India in the wake of a brutal gang-rape in Delhi, replicated later in public revolts against sexual assault in Brazil, South Africa and other countries.

Such levels of global popular mobilisation in the wake of individual incidents of violence against women have not been seen before.

More strikingly, this is happening at a time when rising fundamentalism, widespread austerity, and continued militarism threaten to roll back women’s rights and push aside gender equality demands. Today women’s rights activists have to risk their lives to denounce rape in Mali, refugees fleeing Syria are experiencing forced and early marriage in refugee communities in neighbouring countries, and revolting attacks are being carried out against girls that simply want an education in Afghanistan or Pakistan.

The facts about what the World Health Organisation has recently called “a global health problem of epidemic proportions” remain basically unchanged. More than a third of all women and girls, in countries rich or poor and in peace or at war, will experience violence in their lifetimes, the overwhelming majority of them at the hands of their intimate partner.

The latest resolution of the Security Council and other recent policy gains are signs of progress. Now their inspiring words must be turned into action by investing in women’s empowerment and leadership as the most effective prevention strategy to end violence against women.

It is no coincidence that the majority of advances in recent international jurisprudence on war crimes against women have come from trailblazing women at the helm of international courts or leading international prosecutions. By the same token, laws and police action are not enough to help a battered woman escape an abuse situation and restart her life – only greater equality between the sexes will turn the tide to prevent and end violence against women and girls.

These positive steps must be built upon through decisive action by national governments. They must ensure that violence against women and girls does not happen in the first place and a swift and appropriate response when it does, including effective access to justice. It requires strong international cooperation, among multilateral and regional entities, including UN Women, to empower women and girls and put an end to the atrocities.

And it requires strong efforts by civil society organisations and the global women’s movement to remind both national governments and international organisations that words are not enough, that a few actions are not enough, that we must aim high and keep on moving forward.

*Lakshmi Puri is Acting Head of UN Women and Assistant Secretary-General.

Hardly a day goes by without a news story on some violation of women’s rights. In recent months, appalling incidents of violence against women and girls, from Delhi to Johannesburg to Cleveland, have sparked public outrage and demands to tackle these horrific abuses.

Lakshmi Puri. UN Photo/Devra Berkowitz

In Bangladesh and Cambodia, the shocking loss of life by garment factory workers, many of them women, sparked global debate on how to secure safe and decent jobs in our globalised economy. In Europe, the disproportionate impact on women of austerity cuts, and the use of quotas to get more women on corporate boards continue to make headlines.

Even though women have made real gains, we are constantly reminded how far we have to go to realise equality between men and women.

World leaders recognised the pervasiveness of discrimination and violence against women and girls when they signed onto the visionary Millennium Declaration in 2000. Amongst the eight Millennium Development Goals, they included a goal to promote gender equality and women’s empowerment.

With these goals set to expire in 2015, we are now in a race to achieve them. We are also in the midst a global conversation about what should replace them. It’s time for women to move from the sidelines to the centre.

In a new post-2015 development agenda, we must build on the achievements of the MDGs while avoiding their shortcomings. Everyone agrees that the goals have galvanised progress to reduce poverty and discrimination, and promote education, gender equality, health and safe drinking water and sanitation.

The goal on gender equality and women’s empowerment tracked progress on school enrolment, women’s share of paid work, and women’s participation in parliament. It triggered global attention and action. It served to hold governments accountable, mobilise much-needed resources, and stimulate new laws, policies, programmes and data.

But there are glaring omissions. Noticeably absent is any reference to ending violence against women and girls. Also missing are other fundamental issues, such as women’s right to own property and the unequal division of household and care responsibilities.

By failing to address the structural causes of discrimination and violence against women and girls, progress towards equality has been stalled. Of all the MDGs, the least progress has been made on MDG5, to reduce maternal mortality. The fact that this has been the hardest goal to reach testifies to the depth and scope of gender inequality.

To make greater progress, UN Women proposes a stand-alone goal to achieve gender equality, women’s rights and women’s empowerment that is grounded in human rights and tackles unequal power relations. We envision three areas that require urgent action.

First, ending violence against women and girls must be a priority. From sexual violence in the camps of Haiti and Syria and the Democratic Republic of the Congo to intimate partner shootings in the United States and elsewhere, this violence causes untold physical and psychological harm. It is one of the most pervasive human rights violations, and carries tremendous costs for individuals, families and societies.

Second, women and men need equal opportunities, resources and responsibilities to realize equality. Equal access to land and credit, natural resources, education, health services including sexual and reproductive health, decent work and equal pay needs to be addressed with renewed urgency. Policies, such as child care and parental leave, are needed to relieve working women’s double duty so women and men can enjoy equality at work and at home.

And third, women’s voices must be heard. It is time for women to participate equally in decision making in the household, the private sector and institutions of governance. Despite progress in recent years, women comprise just 20 percent of parliamentarians and 27 percent of judges. For democracy to be meaningful and inclusive, women’s voices and leadership must be amplified in all public and private spaces.

Any new development agenda must be grounded in human rights agreements that governments have already signed onto. This includes the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), the 1995 Beijing Platform for Action, and U.N. resolutions, including the recent agreement of the Commission on the Status of Women on eliminating and preventing all forms of violence against women and girls.

There is plenty of evidence to show that countries with a higher status of women also enjoy higher levels of social and economic performance. There is also evidence to guide countries on what works, from equitable labour market policies, to the removal of discriminatory laws and policies, to universal social protection and social services, to security and justice reforms that end impunity for violence against women and girls. The activism of the women’s movement everywhere has been critical in demanding and driving change in all of these areas.

The discussions to shape the post-2015 global development agenda offer a real opportunity to drive lasting change for women’s rights and equality. A strong global goal can push our societies to the tipping point of rejecting violence and discrimination against women and girls and unleash the potential of half the population for a more peaceful, just and prosperous world and a sustainable planet.

*Lakshmi Puri is Acting Head of UN Women and Assistant Secretary-General.

By Julia Kallas
UNITED NATIONS, Dec 11 2012 (IPS)

Today, approximately 125 countries have laws that penalise domestic violence – a great advance from a decade ago. Yet 603 million women around the world still live in countries where domestic violence is not a crime, and up to seven in ten women are targeted for physical or sexual violence, or both.

One organisation that has worked for the past two years to protect and empower women is U.N. Women, the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women. Lakshmi Puri, deputy executive director of the organisation, described what it has achieved so far.

Lakshmi Puri, assistant secretary-general of the United Nations and deputy executive director of U.N. Women. Credit: Ryan Brown/U.N. Women

”U.N. Women is today a coherent, unified organisation that has achieved concrete results that go from…enhancing women’s voices in decision-making in communities, to leveraging and influencing national and international planning processes,” Puri told IPS.

But as the statistics indicate, much more remains to be done before women’s rights are fully realised. Puri spoke to IPS correspondent Julia Kallas about the achievements, challenges, expectations and future of U.N. Women. Excerpts from the interview follow.

Q: U.N. Women turns two in January. What have been some high points since the founding of U.N. Women?

A: U.N. Women has heavily emphasised increasing women’s political participation. Women must have a say in the decisions that affect their lives and their communities. Our efforts in 14 countries contributed directly to five countries’ increasing the number of women elected to office. And in one year the number of countries with women comprising at least 30 percent of parliament has risen from 27 to 33.

We are also actively supporting women’s representation at the local level. In India, for example, U.N. Women is training 65,000 elected women representatives in village councils to become more effective leaders.

To enhance women’s participation in peacebuilding and post-conflict recovery, U.N. Women has successfully advocated for an agreement to earmark at least 15 percent of all U.N.-managed peacekeeping funds for programmes on gender equality.

Women’s economic empowerment is another key area of our work. Financial security gives women the independence they need to take informed decisions for themselves and their families. So our interventions try to enhance governments’ abilities to improve women’s access to assets, markets, services and decent work.

Ending violence against women remains a top priority. It is a scourge of pandemic proportions, affecting up to 70 percent of women and girls. U.N. Women is working in 85 countries to prevent violence in the first place, to end impunity for these crimes, and to expand essential services to survivors.

Gender equality and women’s empowerment remains a universal challenge and requires actions by all. We know there is still a long road ahead, but we are on the right track. We are working with and in all countries to carry out our universal mandate and we are constantly making progress.

Q: What do you consider the greatest challenges for U.N. Women and women around the world next year and beyond?

A: Many obvious gaps remain in protecting women’s human rights and in advancing their rightful role in development, peace and security. In 2012, our priorities were to make a renewed push for women’s economic empowerment and political participation.

In the months ahead, we will focus on ending violence against women. Next March, the focus of the U.N. Commission on the Status of Women will be to tackle violence against women and girls. Expectations are high for governments to agree on strengthened international frameworks to end violence against women and girls.

In this context, U.N. Women launched COMMIT, an initiative that encourages governments to implement international agreements on ending violence against women and commit to new, concrete steps to end it.

Funding is another challenge we face. Women still constitute a majority of the world’s poor. They are directly and indirectly affected by the financial and economic crisis, as is funding for U.N. Women and women’s organisations around the world. We need all donors to prioritise funding for gender equality and women’s empowerment at this critical time.

In addition to being the right thing to do, it is also the smart thing to do, as evidence shows that investing in women’s empowerment will have an exponential impact on social and economic development.

Q: As emerging economies such as the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) countries grow in political and economic influence, how well have women’s rights kept pace with this development?

A: Some countries have shown deep commitment to gender equality and women’s empowerment and have adopted special policies and measures to rectify deep rooted poverty, customs- and tradition-related biases and gender stereotyping.

Yet we have seen that economic growth does not necessarily translate to greater gender equality. In middle income countries – including the BRICS – remain large numbers of poor people. A disproportionate majority of them are women. As a result, governments, including the BRICS, continue to proactively address this issue.

Q: What are your expectations for getting a comprehensive gender perspective into a post-2015 development framework and the Sustainable Development Goals that are currently being negotiated?

A: What we need is a truly transformative development agenda that can drive change on systemic issues and structural causes of discrimination, including unequal power relations, social exclusion and multiple forms of discrimination.

The framework should therefore focus on women’s rights, eliminating gender-based violence, promoting sexual and reproductive health and rights, access to essential infrastructure and services and political and economic empowerment – all in the broader context of poverty eradication.

The framework should also recognise that gender inequality is the mother of all inequalities. It is not yet clear what the format of the post-2015 development framework will be, but in any case, U.N. Women advocates for a strong focus on gender equality and women’s empowerment.

If we are about to turn a new leaf in terms of a more sustainable, equitable and people-centred development model and framework, we need to empower and fully tap the talent and potential of half of humanity.

Excerpt:

World Water Week recently concluded in Stockholm with a special emphasis on the linkages between water and food security.

Lakshmi Puri. Credit: UN Photo/Devra Berkowitz

From the worst drought in 56 years in the United States Midwest, to the Karnataka’s drought in India, to the protracted drought in the Sahel region of West Africa, we have also seen how in our globalised world the nexus between lack of water and food security in one corner of the world affects us all.

The impact of the drought in the Midwest has resulted in higher prices for corn and soybeans. In the Sahel, 18.7 million people are facing food insecurity. These events are a stark reminder of how the environmental dimension has direct economic and social consequences.

They remind us of the critical inter-linkages between the economic, social and environmental dimensions of development and of how water availability, affordability and quality are related to food security.

Women and girls are at the centre of this connection. In many countries, women carry out most tasks related to water – they walk long hours to fetch water, they cook, they clean, they care for the sick and the elderly, and they grow food for their families and communities.

Yet, women’s participation in decision-making on water and food management is low and they are not sufficiently prioritised in water policies, programmes and infrastructure. Women hold less than six percent of all ministerial positions in the field of environment, natural resources and energy and they are underrepresented at lower levels as well.

The 2012 progress report on the Millennium Development Goal points out that, while the MDG target on water has been largely met, 783 million people still remain without access to an improved source of drinking water. Women are disproportionately affected, which increases their burden and reduces their time for other activities, such as going to school or earning an income.

Globally, it is estimated that women spend more than 200 million hours per day collecting water. In Sub-Saharan Africa, 71 percent of the water collection burden falls on women and girls. This reduces their opportunities for education, decent work, political engagement, and perpetuates the intergenerational transfer of poverty and disempowerment.

While women dominate subsistence agriculture and unpaid water collection tasks, men dominate cash crops. Current estimates show that 70 percent of the world’s water is needed for agriculture, 20 percent for industry, and 10 percent for household use.

In many countries, women’s strategies for lifting themselves and their families out of poverty take place in the household, where the share of global water usage is already low. Even in the agricultural sector, women depend more on non-irrigated and rainfed agriculture. In addition, water rights are often related to land rights, which precludes women smallholder farmers from accessing irrigated water.

Entitlement systems constitute another barrier with women and girls having unequal access to productive resources, such as water, land, fertiliser, finance and credit, and technology, often due to gender norms and stereotypes. If women were to have equal access to agricultural services, including irrigation services, agricultural yields would increase by an estimated 15 to 20 percent, reducing the number of hungry people by 100 to 150 million.

Creating a water- and food-secure world requires putting women and girls at the centre of water and food related policies, actions and financing. Women are not only beneficiaries of greater water and food security; they can also enable greater progress in these areas. Four urgent actions must be taken to unleash women’s potential:

First, women need to be recognised as water managers, farmers and irrigators, who contribute to ensuring sustainable food production and consumption and to safeguarding the environment. This must be done in laws, policies and through social awareness programmes in communities.

Secondly, governments and other partners need to ensure that women are empowered along the water and food supply chain, so that their food production and water management roles are supported. Improvements in infrastructure services— especially water and electricity—can help free up women’s time spent on domestic and care work.

In Pakistan, putting water sources closer to the home was associated with increased time allocated to productive market work. In Tanzania, girls’ school attendance was 15 percent higher for girls from homes located 15 minutes or less from a water source than in homes one hour or more away.

Water supply must cover the needs of the poorest by initiating reforms that make water affordable. The poorest, the majority of whom are women, have less access to safe drinking water and pay more for their water usage.
Thirdly, we need to address the multifaceted gender discriminations in accessing and controlling productive resources. Women must be provided with technical training on water management, irrigation, rainwater harvesting, and rain-fed agriculture.

In South Africa, Lesotho and Uganda, women ministers for water are taking affirmative action to train women for water and sanitation related careers, including science and engineering. At the local level, women have been trained to locate water sources in the village, decide on the location of facilities, and repair pumps.

Fourthly, women must be recognised as decision-makers in water governance. This involves reducing membership fees and broadening the mandate of irrigation schemes to acknowledge and include multiple water users.

In summary, an “ecosystem of policies” must be created – an enabling environment with strong institutions, targeted programmes, capacity-building, functioning systems and sectoral policies. Women’s agency can be built through supporting women’s organizations, self-help groups and women’s cooperatives.

Equitable water security needs to be a public policy priority. This is a message not only to governments, but also to development partners and donors so that they prioritise it in their aid allocations. We need to catalyse alliance, knowledge sharing, commitment, innovations, actions and financing to address the nexus between food security and water from a gender perspective.

The Rio+20 Conference set the basis for a strong international normative framework in this area. Gender equality and women’s empowerment, water security and sustainable water management, and food security and agricultural development were all identified as priorities for a sustainable future. The connection between these priorities, so clearly made in the Rio+20 outcome, must be carried forward.

As we approach the deadline for the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals, a new set of goals will be launched – the Sustainable Development Goals. The three priorities of gender equality and women’s empowerment, water, and food security must be strongly interlinked in the goals that will cover these areas.

The Sustainable Development Goal on water must have clear targets and indicators capturing the gender dimension. It must be reflected with targets and indicators on women’s full participation in water governance, the alleviation of their work burden, and the availability of gender-sensitive infrastructures and services.

Women and girls are thirsty for available, accessible and affordable clean and safe water. We can no longer ruin their potential to become inspiring leaders, successful entrepreneurs or healthy mothers due to their heavy burden of fetching water.

As we move towards the 2013 international year for water cooperation, we need to catalyse alliance, knowledge sharing, commitment, innovations, actions and financing to address issues related to affordability, accessibility and availability of safe and sufficient water for all at all levels.

UN Women will be a strong advocate for leveraging women’s voice and influence in water governance. Gender equality and women’s empowerment must be the part of the blue revolution and green revolution that we seek to launch.

*Lakshmi Puri is the assistant secretary-general and deputy executive director of UN Women.