By Dr. Claudio Schuftan*
1. Unfortunately, the Sustainable Development Goal targets did not explicitly mentioning the need to address extreme wealth and the need to implement redistributive policies, the latter an essential tool to achieve meaningful widespread human rights (HR) enjoyment the world over. (i) (CESR) (i): Think of all the resources that have gone into producing the SDGs --resources that have come out of official aid and NGO program budgets-- and you may rightfully wonder if they could not have been otherwise well invested. The impression these fanfares create is that a vast effort to agree an international -- global-- agenda means that we are half way there. No wonder people are getting on boats and walking through barbed wire towards a better life. (Maggie Black)
2. Pushing these Goals as an agenda for providing social safety nets as a response to an economic model that was and still is increasing inequalities is pure madness. The onus now falls squarely on public interest civil society groups to use the SDGs to make decisive course corrections. (S. Fukuda-Parr) No global agreement is going to save the day.(ii) Our powers lie elsewhere, in our communities especially, and this is where we must take the battle. (ii): When the former General Assembly President Razali Ismail of Malaysia cautioned in 1996 about the “creeping irrelevance” of big international gatherings, he was almost branded a rebel.
Ebola battlers in Liberia. Queer feminists from South Africa. LGBTI activists in Uganda.
All of these women have contributed to the struggle for democracy and justice in Africa.
And all of them—and many more—were present at the African Feminist Forum, a biennial event at which the women working to build a more progressive Africa strengthen their ties and share their stories.
Learn about some of these women and their extraordinary work.
International Day of Action for Women's Health
Our Health, Our Rights, Our Lives!
Women's Health Matters
May 28 is the International Day of Action for Women’s Health. May 28th has been commemorated by women ’s health advocates and their communities since 1987 and has been crucial in the Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights (SRHR) movement building. May 28 provides a great opportunity to remind our government leaders that Women’s Health Matters.
With the recent adoption of Agenda 2030, governments have acknowledged gender equality and women’s empowerment as crucial to sustainable development, while reaffirming the outcomes from the ICPD Programme of Action and the Beijing Platform for Action. Central to women’s empowerment, however, is the respect, protection, and fulfilment of the human rights of women and girls in all their dimensions, including their sexual and reproductive rights, and acknowledging the actual needs of all women and girls in all their diversities!
GENEVA (8 March 2016) – The right to sexual and reproductive health is not only an integral part of the general right to health but fundamentally linked to the enjoyment of many other human rights, including the rights to education, work and equality, as well as the rights to life, privacy and freedom from torture, and individual autonomy, UN experts have said in an authoritative new legal commentary*.
Yet, the experts from the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (CESCR) note, “the full enjoyment of the right to sexual and reproductive health remains a distant goal for millions of people, especially for women and girls, throughout the world.”
The commentary, adopted by CESCR’s 18 independent members, highlights the numerous legal, procedural, practical and social barriers people face in accessing sexual and reproductive health care and information, and the resulting human rights violations.
Define work. (Reuters/Soe Zeya Tun)
By Annalisa Merelli - May 18, 2016
Women often aren’t paid for the work they do. Every day they chalk up an average of 4.5 hours of free labor in household chores and childcare regardless of where they are in the world. In developing countries, women can do 10 times as much as men.
If the hours of unpaid labor done by women worldwide were paid at minimum wage, they would be worth at least $10 trillion—more than the GDP of China, according to a conservative estimate by McKinsey.
But these are just estimates. In truth, we don’t have sufficient data on much of the work done by women around the world. The same society and infrastructure that collects and applies data from every facet of our lives can’t efficiently track the hours women work and get paid outside official workplaces.
