From 20-22 September, close to 140 Heads of State and Government gathered at UN Headquarters for the three-day High-Level Plenary Meeting of the General Assembly on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), also known as the “MDG Summit.” Ten years ago, all UN Member States – 189 at that time – adopted the Millennium Declaration, which provided the basis for elaborating the eight MDG Goals, most of them with time-bound targets, ranging from halving hunger and poverty by 2015 to dealing comprehensively with the debt problems of developing countries.
The summit sought to accelerate progress towards achieving the MDGs by 2015 and to undertake a comprehensive review of successes, best practices and lessons learnt, obstacles and gaps, challenges and opportunities that could lead to concrete strategies for action. In advance of the summit, the UN Secretary- General released his report Keeping the Promise, which calls for a new pact to accelerate progress in achieving the Goals in the coming years. The report provided a basis for negotiations in the run up to the summit.
On the final day of the summit, Member States adopted an outcome document – “Keeping the Promise: United to Achieve the Millennium Development Goals”– in which Member States set out an action agenda in order to reach the Goals by 2015.
Notably, the outcome document highlights the importance of gender equality and women’s empowerment to the achievement of the MDGs:
“We recognize that gender equality, the empowerment of women, women’s full enjoyment of all human rights and the eradication of poverty are essential to economic and social development, including the achievement of all the Millennium Development Goals. We reaffirm the need for the full and effective implementation of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action. Achieving gender equality and empowerment of women is both a key development goal and an important means for achieving all of the Millennium Development Goals. We welcome the establishment of the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women (UN Women), and pledge our full support for its operationalisation.”
“We acknowledge the importance of gender equality and empowerment of women to achieve the Millennium Development Goals. Women are agents of development. We call for action to ensure the equal access of women and girls to education, basic services, health care, economic opportunities and decisionmaking at all levels. We stress that investing in women and girls has a multiplier effect on productivity, efficiency and sustained economic growth. We recognize the need for gender mainstreaming in the formulation and implementation of development policies.”
Specifically, the Summit Document describes the international commitment to achieving MDG3: Gender Equality:
“(a) Taking action to achieve the goals of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action and its twelve critical areas of concern, our commitments in the Programme of Action of the International Conference on Population and Development and the obligations and commitments of States parties to the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women and the Convention on the Rights of the Child
(b) Ensuring access to education and successful schooling of girls by removing barriers and expanding support for girls’ education through measures such as providing free primary education, a safe environment for schooling and financial assistance such as scholarships and cash transfer programmes, promoting supportive policies to end discrimination against women and girls in education, and tracking completion and attendance rates with a view to retaining girls in schools through secondary levels;
(c) Empowering women, in particular women living in poverty, through, inter alia, social and economic policies that guarantee them full and equal access to all levels of quality education and training and vocational training, including technical, managerial and entrepreneurial training, and to affordable and adequate public and social services;
(d) Ensuring that women benefit from policy measures to generate full and productive employment and decent work for all, in accordance with commitments by States to International Labour Organization conventions, including policy measures to promote, inter alia, access of women and girls, including mothers and pregnant women, to formal and non-formal education, equal skills development and employment opportunities, closing wage gaps between women and men and recognizing women’s unpaid work, including care work;
(e) Investing in infrastructure and labour-saving technologies, especially in rural areas, benefiting women and girls by reducing their burden of domestic activities, affording the opportunity for girls to attend school and women to engage in self-employment or participate in the labour market;
(f) Taking action to improve the numbers and active participation of women in all political and economic decision-making processes, including by investing in women’s leadership in local decision-making structures and processes, encouraging appropriate legislative action and creating an even playing field for men and women in political and Government institutions, and intensifying our efforts for the equal participation of women and men as key stakeholders at all levels in the prevention and resolution of conflicts and peacebuilding processes;
(g) Strengthening comprehensive national laws and policies and programmes to enhance accountability and raise awareness, prevent and combat all forms of violence against women and girls everywhere, which undermine their full enjoyment of all human rights, and ensure that women have access to justice and protection, and that all perpetrators of such violence are duly investigated, prosecuted and punished in order to end impunity, in conformity with national legislation, international humanitarian law and international human rights law;
(h) Improving national-level capacity to monitor and report on progress, gaps and opportunities through better generation and use of sex- and age-disaggregated data, including with the support of the international community;
(i) Enhancing the impact of development assistance in advancing gender equality and empowerment of women and girls through targeted activities including capacity-building, as well as through gender mainstreaming and enhanced dialogue between donors and partners, involving, as appropriate, civil society and the private sector, with a view to ensuring adequate funding;
(j) Facilitating access by women to affordable microfinance, in particular microcredit, which can contribute to poverty eradication, gender equality and the empowerment of women;
(k) Promoting and protecting women’s equal access to adequate housing, property and land, including rights to inheritance, and enabling them to secure access to credit through appropriate constitutional, legislative and administrative measures;
(l) Promoting women’s economic empowerment and ensuring women’s access to productive resources. In this regard, strengthening gender responsive public management in order to ensure gender equality in resource allocation, capacity development and benefit sharing in all sectors, including in central and local level governments.”
The outcome document also includes a gendered aspect in the outline of the commitments to each of the other MDGs, an approach which has been lacking in the past and likely has contributed to slow progress.
For more information, please visit http://www.un.org/en/mdg/summit2010/
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