Women make their move

We don’t know who planned it, or even if it was planned at all. But we are seeing a timely, significant, and maybe even groundbreaking confluence of events this year and next year, which has at its heart the agreements and outcomes of an unprecedented series of international conferences in the 1990s and 2000s.

These are: the “Earth Summit” on the environment in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, the Vienna Conference on Human Rights in 1993, the Cairo International Conference on Population and Development in 1994, the Beijing International Conference on Women in 1995, and the Global Leaders’ Summit in 2000 that resulted in the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which will come up for review next year.

Some 20 years have passed since the holding of the international conferences, and as with any anniversary, the occasion has called for a review of the successes and failures of the final documents they produced, commitments that governments of the world had pledged to uphold and promote.

The MDGs, meanwhile, will come up for review in 2015, with what should amount to a “report card” on the achievements of each signatory government, and, of course, its failures.

For women, it is time to look back to Beijing and count the victories and weigh the losses of the last 20 years. And the result of that “gender audit” should, I think, result in the same “cha-cha-cha” of one step forward and two steps backward—women making significant progress in the fields of education, leadership, health and human rights, and women subjected to the age-old bugaboos of gender-based violence, sexual exploitation and abuse, gender-based poverty, lack of

opportunity.

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How to move out of the lockstep of the same old cha-cha-cha?

Ongoing at the United Nations headquarters in New York is the 58th session of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW), with members of government delegations taking part in poring over the wording and phrasing of a draft “outcome document” that, it is hoped, will both bring the status of women forward and expand the coverage of government concerns to cover, say, gender orientation and expanded rights.

Why is this yearly exercise in what so often seems to be nitpicking and parsing so important this time around? Because, say experts, the final document emerging from CSW58 (meaning, the 58th session of the Commission on the Status of Women) will be a “stepping stone” to the outcome document emerging from the meetings and negotiations of the UN Commission on Population and Development which will take place next month. And then it is the ardent hope of women advocates, including their friends in the reproductive health and rights field, that the resulting documents will in turn succeed in placing sexual and reproductive health and rights in the center of what is being called the “post-2015 development agenda.”

If the MDGs laid out the priority areas for governments to meet specific, measurable, and time-bound commitments—goals that covered areas such as poverty reduction, education, child and maternal survival, and funding, the post-2015 agenda should, in the words of a diplomat, “push the limits of possibilities to bring sexual and reproductive health and rights to the center.”

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“We were very disappointed in the MDGs,” recalled a woman activist. “Women seemed to count only as mothers, with no mention made of women’s rights and aspirations.”

In fact, MDG No. 5, which set out to reduce maternal mortality in all countries, was only amended a few years later to include the goal of increasing women’s access to family planning, a crucial element in their survival as mothers.

This time around, women are determined that the world’s “development agenda” will have women front and center.

At a “side event” sponsored by the Asia-Pacific women’s NGO Dawn and the Georgian mission to the UN, the issue posed to the panelists was that sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) was simply “too sensitive” and “too controversial” an issue to ever make it the center of a global agenda, or have diplomats debate it.

“Is SRHR too controversial so we should just sidestep it?” asked Gita Sen, an Indian economist and a founder of Dawn. Gender issues and women’s rights, she pointed out, “always get caught in [global] North and South battles, in battles over economic and political power.” So diplomats and world leaders, she said, often end up agreeing to “trade away” the lives and health of women in exchange for economic agreements, or to silence talk of corruption or accountability.

“Sexual and reproductive health and rights is not the only controversial issue, for what issue has ever not been controversial in the UN?” she said.

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Francois Girard of the International Women’s Health Coalition pointed out that “it has never been easy” to protect and promote the rights of women to health and care—including funding. But she assured the audience that in fact so many firm victories had already been won by women since Cairo, and there has been considerable progress made in issues like maternal mortality and bringing down the rates of reproductive tract infections and sexually transmitted infections.

But it was Sayeeta Ali, a health activist in Kenya, who brought the “lived reality” of women in Africa, in particular the story of a friend of hers who died in childbirth after her eighth delivery, to the table. “We have no choice but to deal with these issues,” she insisted. “Gender inequality gives us no choice and no power, and avoiding all talk of sexual and reproductive health and rights will only lead to the deaths of more women and girls.”