In India, members of a network of single women, Ekal Nari Shakti Sangathan, that helps secure the right of widows to live with dignity and justice. UN Women/Gaganjit Singh (File)
UN S-G at Financing for Development (FfD) Conference at Addis Ababa
14 July 2015 – Increased investments in gender equality are vital if the world is to achieve sustained economic growth and development, United Nations Secretary-General said today during the Third International Conference on Financing for Development, in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
“It is clear that we have not invested sufficiently in gender equality,” Mr. Ban said at a side event hosted by UN Women and the World Bank on Financing for Gender Equality. “We know that persisting gaps in gender equality and women's empowerment in the world have been a barrier to the full achievement of each of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).”
Representatives of the CSO – Civil Society Organizations Financing for Development (FfD) Group delivered an abridged, shorter version of the Declaration in the opening segment of the July 13 afternoon session of the FfD Plenary. https://csoforffd.files.wordpress.com/2015/07/cso-statement-to-ffd-plenary-13-july-2015.pdf
We, members of more than 600 civil society organizations and networks from around the world that have been engaged in the process leading up to and including the Third International Conference on Financing for Development (Addis Ababa, July 13-16 2015), convened a CSO Forum in advance of the conference. We have the following reflections and recommendations to convey to the Member States of the United Nations and the international community. We want to express appreciation for the participation and access civil society was accorded in the preparatory process so far.
29 June 2015 - Today, at least 795 million people are experiencing extreme, chronic malnourishment and that number jumps to two billion if micronutrient deficiency or ‘hidden hunger’ is factored in. Nearly 60 percent of the nearly one billion people who go hungry every day are women and girls. They are the poorest of the poor, and they are most vulnerable in the global food system. A new BRIDGE Cutting Edge Report on Gender and Food Security provides a critical lens on the shocking global gender disparities that characterize food and nutrition insecurity.
A look at the evidence makes it clear that gender inequalities are a key cause of this reality. For example, against a backdrop of rapid economic growth, women and girls in India remain among the most food insecure in the world mainly because of entrenched gender biases that de-prioritize their needs and erode their rights. These deep gender inequalities in food security exist even though women constitute the majority of food producers in the world and are often managing their families’ nutritional needs. Poor women are often doing this despite gendered norms and constraints that restrict their access to productive resources, and global and national forces that push down the market value of their own produce while raising prices of food they need to purchase.
A Good Practice Guide
Around the world, human rights violations compromise public health. Sexual violence, unlawful discrimination, land dispossession, police harassment, forced medical interventions, and denial of essential services threaten health and wellbeing. This is especially true for people who are socially marginalized and disempowered—including sex workers, Roma, people who live with HIV, use drugs, need palliative care, and have intellectual or psychosocial disabilities.
Programs that improve these communities’ access to justice can play critical roles in deterring such abuses. Since 2007, Open Society has initiated and supported community-based peer paralegals, street-based lawyers, legal services that integrate into health care, and web-based legal advice. And we have engaged traditional community justice structures like chiefs and elders.
Approaches to Measuring Gender
How can change be measured at individual and social levels, in both formal and informal spheres? There is an increasing array of monitoring and evaluation frameworks, methodologies and approaches. In terms of methods, the ‘hard figures’ produced by quantitative approaches are crucial to building the case for addressing gender disparities. Gender scales have become a useful tool in this respect; numerical scores aggregating multiple indicators in order to try and capture multifaceted changes.
Meanwhile, qualitative methods enable a more in-depth examination of gender relations and other issues not easily ‘counted’. Thus, the ideal methodology is a combined approach that incorporates both quantitative and qualitative methods……
EIGE – European Institute for Gender Equality – GENDER STATISTICS - http://eige.europa.eu/gender-mainstreaming/tools-and-methods/gender-statistics
