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http://www.wedo.org/files/InvestinginWomen.htm

Investing in Women Makes Good Sense

It has been six years since the first United Nations conference on Financing for Development (FfD) and women are still the poorest of the poor-more than two-thirds of the one billion people living on less than $1.00 day are women and children.

 

And though we hear again and again from the UN Secretary-General, from the World Bank, from all sorts of development experts that investing in women is essential to development, we don't see the actions necessary for improving the lives of women-an achievement that would benefit the whole of society.

 

Today, women make only 25% of the global income and own 1% of the land. In most of the world, unpaid family and household care still rests on women. It is estimated that this unremunerated, invisible work amounts to 10-30% of world GDP, in the trillions of dollars.

 

This year's meeting of the UN Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) held in March zeroed in on the critical issue of financing for gender equality, in anticipation of the second FfD conference to be held in Doha this November.

A large number of ministers of women's agencies and thousands of women activists from around the world came to the meeting with a resounding message: commitments to women's equality made at previous UN development conferences are not being implemented because of a lack of genuine political will. 

Women have long understood that these commitments will only be met if they are backed up by adequate financial resources. Together, we are pushing for governments to dig into their pockets and deliver the necessary funds.

 

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon recently called women the world's "most significant yet largely untapped potential for development and peace."  But he also acknowledged that women are still severely hampered by discrimination and a lack of resources and economic opportunities.

 

One study found that if countries of Subsaharan Africa and North Africa had closed the gender gap in schooling between 1960 and 1992 as quickly as East Asia did, their income per capita could have grown by an additional 0.5 - 0.9 percentage point per year, doubling their per capita income growth.

 

The CSW in its agreed conclusions called on all governments, donor agencies, other countries, the United Nations and international financial institutions to invest sufficient resources for gender equality and women's empowerment. However, women's activists expressed a deep concern that there are few meaningful concrete commitments in the Agreed Conclusions related to financing for gender equality. For more analysis visit the WEDO website and read the Linkage Caucus Statement.

 

The UN, other international agencies and bilateral donors, as well as national and local governments need to adopt explicit measures on how much of their fund are allocated to meet the needs of women and girls.

 

We all know that not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts. For too long we have heard we can't disaggregate the data, the numbers by gender. If we don't have a baseline, how can we know if we are making progress. Money isn't everything. But in this case it can make a real difference-and, in this case, it can be counted.

 

WEDO will continue to advocate with other women's groups in the lead-up to the Doha Conference to address the shortcomings of the previous FfD commitments and secure a Doha outcome that makes good sense. The time has come to put women at the center of financing for development.





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