WUNRN
For Financing for Development Conference Outcome Document 2015 – Scroll down to Part 2 of this WUNRN release.
LINK TO FULL 10-PAGE WWG STATEMENT: https://wwgonffd.files.wordpress.com/2015/07/women-working-group-reaction-to-addis-ababa-action-agenda-17-july-20151.pdf
WOMEN’S WORKING GROUP ON FINANCING FOR DEVELOPMENT
REACTION TO THE OUTCOME DOCUMENT OF THE THIRD FfD CONFERENCE
The
Women’s Working Group on Financing for Development (WWG on FfD) expresses its
strong disappointment with the Addis Ababa Action Agenda adopted at the
conclusion of the Third Financing for Development Conference that took place in
Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, 13 to 16 July 2015.
For
feminists and women’s rights organizations, the Outcome document of the Third
International Conference on Financing for Development: Addis Ababa Action
Agenda (AAAA) fails to remove the global obstacles to development and to shift
the balance of power in the international financial architecture in order to
address systemic issues and create the conditions to respect, protect and
fulfill human rights, in particular women’s rights. It fails also to
acknowledge the macro-economic dimension of the unpaid domestic and care work and
the need to reduce and redistribute it among the State, private sector,
communities, families, men and women.
The
AAAA might leave the impression to some that it is strong on gender equality,
women’s empowerment and women’s rights. However, while the AAAA, importantly
notes in the first paragraph a commitment to respect all human rights,
including the right to development, and that member states will ensure gender
equality and women’s and girls’ empowerment, it lacks an integrated, consistent
and explicit human rights based approach. The references to gender equality and
women also rely on previously agreed language (i.e. Rio+20, Open Working Group
(OWG) of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), Doha), some of which
consolidate regressive formulations (i.e., as found in Paragraph 6), others
rely heavily on private sector contributions to achieving gender equality (such
as Para 41).
Moreover,
some of the references about women’s rights in the outcome document show strong
tendencies towards the instrumentalization of women (i.e. Para 21) and to
financing gender equality and women’s empowerment as a means to achieve
economic growth, to increase productivity and to improve economic performance.
This reference is limiting, rather than realizing women’s and girls’ human
rights as per the foundation of the UN.
The
outcome document has seriously reduced the integrity of the Financing for
Development (FfD) agenda. On several points, there has been a serious
retrogression from the commitments made in Monterrey (2002) and Doha (2008).
The potential of removing global obstacles to development, setting the right
priorities, policies and rules for financing the SDGs/Post 2015 Development
Agenda and allowing for the full implementation of other internationally agreed
development agendas, including those critical for women’s rights such as the
Beijing Platform for Action and the Cairo Programme of Action is being severely
curtailed.
The
global partnership between developed and developing countries established in
the Monterrey Consensus has been weakened by the developed countries through:
i) their promotion of multi-stakeholder partnerships, ii) their lack of
commitment to address systemic issues in the United Nations (UN), iii) their
inability to fully recognize and respect the principle of Common But
Differentiated Responsibilities (CBDR) and iv) their disagreement over the
establishment of an FfD Commission. While the document includes a narrative of “sustainable
development”, it still relies on orthodox economic assumptions regarding
growth, ‘trickle-down effects’, commodification of nature and people. The WWG
on FfD flags the following key issues and demands structural changes in the
global economic governance and development architecture in order to move:
As
feminists and women´s human rights organizations, we reaffirm the centrality of
ensuring respect, protection and fulfillment of women`s human rights also in
the Financing for Development Agenda. The Forum for Financing for Development,
more than ever, will be the space in which we continue to strive for structural
commitments to change the current economic and financial rules, system and unequal
power relations. We will keep on demanding the level of ambition needed to
achieve this task from Member States, so that true actions to subvert
structural inequalities are implemented……..
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________
Link to Full 39-Page Addis Ababa Conference 2015
Financing for Development Outcome Document:
http://www.un.org/ga/search/view_doc.asp?symbol=A/CONF.227/L.1