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What Will Shape Women's Rights over the Next 15 Years?
What should be included in the sustainable development
goals to promote women’s equality and empowerment, and will they work?
One of the SDGs encourages the world to ‘achieve
gender equality and empower all women and girls’. Photograph: Paballo
Thekiso/AFP/Getty Images
By Carla Kweifio-Okai – 14 January 2015
Decisions made in 2015 will help shape the women’s
rights agenda for the next 15 years. In September, world leaders will endorse a
new set of development goals at the UN. The proposed Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which will
replace the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), feature a
standalone goal on gender, which encourages the world to “achieve gender
equality and empower all women and girls”.
Goal number five of the Sustainable Development Goals
currently features 9 targets, which are:
A target in goal number three – promoting healthy
lives and wellbeing – calls for universal access to sexual and reproductive
health services.
Discussions about the content of the goals, which will
apply to all countries, began in 2013, and a final draft was published in July.
The UN starts negotiations next week on finalising the SDGs.
Do you think these targets are sufficient? Has
anything been missed out or lost in the discussions? What do you think should
be a priority in your country? Are LGBT rights being ignored? Will a
requirement to ban FGM make the final document? How will countries that have a
poor record on women’s rights view the SDGs?