THE FUTURE WOMEN WANT – Rio+20

THE FUTURE WOMEN WANT

The paradigm shift towards sustainable development must be based on the premise of human rights, gender equality and women’s empowerment. This shift requires a renewed focus on people-centred development that prioritizes the expansion of capabilities, the eradication of poverty and the reduction of all types of inequalities, and that promotes the rights and agency of women. It is a shift to a world where women and men, girls and boys—not profit—are placed at the centre of action and decision-making, and all people take responsibility for sustainable production and consumption and respect the earth’s resource limits.

The new development agenda should value women’s unique, adaptive and innovative potential, and their concrete contributions, paid and unpaid, to their families, societies and economies. Stronger measures are needed to reduce the unpaid care work women do, and to share this work among women, men and institutions more equitably.

The three dimensions of sustainable development and their integration cannot be fully addressed without recognizing the centrality of gender equality and women’s empowerment. The post-Rio+20 and post-2015 development agenda needs to be built on this paradigm shift and draw from the principles of the global normative framework developed over the last decades, including the comprehensive standards laid out in the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action and other commitments such as the Programme of Action of the International Conference on Population and Development.

Any new set of goals must be built on the MDGs, mainstream gender equality and women’s empowerment and contain gender-sensitive targets and indicators. There should also be a separate gender equality goal that moves beyond the current MDG3 and captures the economic, social and environmental dimensions of sustainable development. UN Women will continue to work with governments, civil society and other stakeholders to develop any new set of goals.

The 2005 strategic priorities of the Millennium Project Task Force are still relevant and should be core components of this enhanced goal on gender equality and women’s empowerment. These include promoting women and girls’ full and equal access to post-primary education; protecting and securing their sexual and reproductive health and rights; investing in infrastructure that reduces their time burdens; guaranteeing their property and inheritance rights; eliminating gender inequality in employment; increasing women’s participation in parliaments and local governments; and combating sexual and genderbased violence against women and girls.

The new framework should be universal and based on human rights principles. It should capture poverty, deprivation and other inequalities that intersect with gender inequality, such as discrimination on the basis of age, income, location (rural or urban), race, ethnicity, disability and other factors, including the specific situations of indigenous peoples and people living with HIV and AIDS. This framework must also include a specific target and indicators on ending violence against women and girls. It is critical that the ideals and vision of the Future We Want drives
the process of developing the goals, targets and indicators for the new development framework.

Accountability for all actors—governments, the United Nations and other international
organizations, international financial institutions and regional banks, civil society and the private sector—should be integrated into the new paradigm and framework. The participation of civil society, including women’s rights organizations, must be central to the discussions and debates around the setting of goals and priorities and
in monitoring and evaluating progress.

We have all the knowledge, technology and resources required to act now. We need leadership and political commitment for urgent and comprehensive action. Women are dynamic partners for promoting coherence, integration and innovation in sustainable development. We call on governments to reaffirm and strengthen the global norms on gender equality and women’s empowerment. We call on governments to accelerate the full implementation of thosestandards.

We therefore call for action to:

A. Enable women to contribute to and benefit from sustainable development

• Provide universal access to essential services, such as safe drinking water and basic sanitation, energy, education and health, including sexual and reproductive health, and ensure equal representation of women in management and service provision.
• Guarantee women’s right to own productiveresources and assets, such as land, natural resources, finance, technology and information, in order to enable women’s economic empowerment and sustainable management of these resources.
• Ensure that women participate in and benefit from education and employment opportunities in sustainable economies.
• Develop green jobs that have a strong focus on women’s economic empowerment.
• Scale up and transfer cost-effective gender-responsive technologies such as labour and time-saving technologies.
• Adopt the social protection floor approach with a gender perspective to
provide basic social protection for all.
• Take measures to ensure long-term financial support for basic social services for women and men, girls and boys, particularly those working in the informal sector.

B. Leverage women’s agency and leadership for sustainable development

• Promote women’s equal access to and full participation in decisionmaking and governance processes at all levels in the economic, social and environmental dimensions.
• Take temporary special measures to accelerate women’s access to decision-making processes.
• Ensure that women, including young women, are equal participants in the development of any sustainable development institutional framework, mechanism or implementation tool.
• Recognize the contributions of women and women’s organizations to innovation and transformation.

C. Create an enabling environment for gender equality in sustainable development

• Prioritize gender equality and women’s empowerment in policies and strategies on trade, development cooperation, foreign direct investment, transfer of technology and capacity development.
• Integrate gender perspectives into national planning and budgeting, implementation,
monitoring and evaluation frameworks in order to align gender equality commitments with sustainable development goals.
• Ensure dedicated financial investments for gender equality and women’s empowerment in all programmes and projects, including for community-based programmes and infrastructure support.
• Engage women scientists, innovators and decision makers fully in the development
and design process of green technologies.
• Improve the quality of development cooperation and increase its development
impact by prioritizing gender equality and women’s empowerment.
• Invest in knowledge transfer and technical assistance for capacity-building on gender equality and sustainable development.
• Collect, analyse and disseminate data disaggregated by sex, age and rural/urban areas and other factors, and develop gender-sensitive indicators to serve as a basis for gender-responsive policy.

D. Establish a gender-responsive development framework

• Fully recognize and integrate gender equality and human rights in the overall mandate of any future institutional framework for sustainable development.
• Elaborate and adopt a specific sustainable development goal on gender equality and
women’s empowerment and support the integration of gender-sensitive targets and indicators in all other goals.
• Promote coordination, coherence and integration of gender equality in the implementation of commitments for sustainable development, including the Beijing Platform for Action.

UN Women is the UN organization dedicated to gender equality and the empowerment of women. A global champion for women and girls, UN Women was established to accelerate progress on meeting their needs worldwide.UN Women supports UN Member States as they set global standards for achieving gender equality, and works with governments and civil society to design laws, policies, programmes and services needed to implement these standards.

It stands behind women’s equal participation in all aspects of life, focusing on five priority areas: increasing women’s leadership and participation; ending violence against women; engaging women in all aspects of peace and security processes; enhancing women’s economic empowerment; and making gender equality central to national development planning and budgeting. UN Women also coordinates and promotes the UN system’s work in advancing gender equality.

UNDESA
Report – UN WOMEN
Lead Photo – World Pulse