The Secretary-General Report for the 68th Session of the Commission on the Status of Women provides an analysis of women’s poverty and outlines the financing and institutional arrangements required to meet the Beijing Declaration and Sustainable Development Goals.
Six key recommendations are made in response to the priority theme: “Accelerating the achievement of gender equality and the empowerment of all women and girls by addressing poverty and strengthening institutions and financing with a gender perspective”.
1. Integrate a gender perspective into financing for development commitments
- Implement policies and legislation that promote gender equality
- Improve access to opportunities for participation and leadership in the economy
- Eliminate gender-based violence and discrimination in all its forms
- Promote gender-responsive budgeting achieved through greater transparency and equal participation in the budgeting process
- Encourage the private sector to contribute to the advancement of gender equality
2. Expand fiscal space for investments to end poverty for women and girls
- Ensure a more effective and accessible global financial safety net
- Strengthen international tax cooperation to be more inclusive and effective, with a focus on combating tax evasion
- Implement progressive tax policies
- Address sovereign debt restructurings and eliminate conditionalities in debt relief initiatives
- Finance women leading local climate adaptation and mitigation efforts
- Reallocate harmful subsidies and tax incentives to gender-responsive policies and programmes
3. Strengthen public institutions for accountability
- Increase women’s representation, leadership, and participation in economic institutions
- Strengthen gender analysis in national and local budgetary processes
- Foster participation in budget processes through open budgets, community, citizen-led monitoring of service delivery
- Enforce core labor standards by ensuring minimum wage legislation and equal pay for equal work of equal value
- Support women entrepreneurs and women-owned businesses
4. Engage and finance women’s organizations and collectives
- Provide robust and flexible multi-year financing for women’s organizations
- Ensure local women’s rights organizations have adequate resources and capacity to advocate for women’s rights
- Implement policies to ensure the full, effective and meaningful participation of collectives, associations and unions of women workers
- Support women that advocate for decent work and the sustainable use of natural resources
5. Enhance multidimensional poverty data and statistics
- Strengthen the capacity of national statistical offices and government institutions to collect, analyze, disseminate and use data
- Increase the collection and use of data on social norms related to decision-making
- Strengthen citizen-generated data to shed light on the challenges faced by women living in poverty
6. Foster new development strategies towards sustainable economies and societies
- Ensure strategies comply with the obligations to respect, protect and fulfill the human rights of women living in poverty
- Introduce new metrics beyond gross domestic product
- Create policies that address systemic barriers to ensure an adequate standard of living for women and girls
- Scale up investment in the care economy as a source of decent employment that has the potential to narrow gender gaps
You can read the full report here:
CSW68 Report of the Secretary-General
Author: Lauren Grant, Youth Representative
