There is cause for celebrating commitments made for women and girls by UN heads of state in adopting the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, as well as a sense of relief as it became evident that prolonging the negotiating process would only result in a watered-down text. But this feeling is bittersweet.
The 2030 sustainable development agenda, formally adopted in September 2015, was the result of three-year process throughout which women’s rights activists and organizations mobilized to put gender equality and women’s human rights at the center.
This week, the Post-2015 Development Agenda will be formally adopted, culminating in 3 years of intense work for numerous stakeholders. As a youth representative of civil society – the ASTRA Youth network of young sexual and reproductive health and rights advocates, I feel honoured to have had the opportunity to cooperate with a group of amazing activists, who have been tirelessly advocating for youth and women’s rights, trying to ensure that the new agenda is ambitious, progressive and human rights-focused.
After a three-year process, country representatives meeting in the basement of United Nations headquarters in New York adopted, in the late evening of Sunday 2 August, the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development to guide global development priorities for the next fifteen years.
Today we stand at the last milestone of the post 2015 development agenda process. In the coming two weeks of negotiations at the UN – and the months of informal consultations to follow - there will be debates on the language of the initial declaration, the SDGs and their targets, the means of implementation (MOI); and follow up and review mechanisms outlined in the draft outcome document.
World leaders at the development finance summit may have paid lip service to women’s rights, but the Addis Ababa action agenda tells a different story
With only a few days until the Third International Conference on Financing for Development (FfD3) starts on July 13th in the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa, and governments at the UN headquarters in New York are still locked in negotiations on the outcome document. In the midst of this uncertainty, one thing is certain - what is finally agreed in Addis will impact how the next fifteen years of development financing are shaped, including financing for women’s rights, gender equality and the sustainable development goals (SDGs), to be agreed on September 2015 at the UN General Assembly.
This statement was delivered by women's rights organizations at the international NGO conference "Advancing the Post-2015 Sustainable Development Agenda" that was held from 20-22 March 2013 in Bonn, Germany.
The Center for Economic and Social Rights (CESR), Amnesty International (AI), and the Association for Women's Rights in Development (AWID) put together the following joint response to the Working Document which will be discussed by the Open Working Group on Sustainable Development at the 11th session May 5-9, 2014 in New York.
April 30, 2014
The draft agreed conclusions, or ‘zero draft,’ produced by UN Women to open discussions ahead of the 58th session of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW), which will be held in New York between 10 and 21 March 2014, was released on 4 February. AWID offers here initial reactions and analysis as negotiations begin.