Not on track: the 2030 agenda at half time

 

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Had the opportunity yesterday to remotely address the Opening Ceremony of the Global Partnership for Effective Development Summit.  The result of a rather last-minute invitation from the Swiss Agency for Development Cooperation, IWRAW APs core funder, we would have rather had our community partners do the talking, but it was too short a window to mobilise grassroots voices, and too short a time slot to show a video, even if we had one that was appropriate.

The concept note for the session describes it as The 2030 Agenda at Half-time  (FIFA World Cup terminology???) and the phrase used repeatedly was that “we are not on track for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals”.  The line-up on the podium was heavy with Presidents and VIPs. -  Ignazio Cassis, the President of the Swiss Federation, Paul Kagame, President of Uganda, Maia Sandu, President of Moldova, Amina J Mohamed Deputy Secretary General of the UN and Vitalice Heja the Executive Director of Reality of Aid Africa. Raj Kumar, CEO and Editor-in-Chief of Devex made a scene setting presentation. At the end of the presentations, the Master of Ceremonies/Moderator, Claire Doole asked me a few questions.

Claire:  What does not being on track for the achievement of the SDGs mean for the women you work with/represent

Priyanthi.  I wish the women were here to tell you what it means.  What I have learned from them is that it means that their lives become more impoverished and harder, that they continue to become even more disadvantaged and discriminated against when it comes to the protection and fulfilment of their rights and gender equality becomes a distant dream.   Women need – food, health, education, decent work, water and sanitation etc etc – so not achieving each of those goals means that Goal 5 – achieving gender equality – is also compromised.

Claire:  How important is it that women are sitting at the decision-making table?

Priyanthi.   It's very important to have women at the decision-making table. We see some good examples here – Rwanda, Moldova.  But what is just as or even more important is that the voices of women in vulnerable situations are heard and that the spaces in which decisions are made are not patriarchal or dismissive of women’s lived experience - especially the lived experience of women who experience multiple forms of discrimination 

In South Asia where I am from, we have seen many women heads of states - but that didn't necessarily translate into a better deal for women on the ground.

IWRAW AP creates the spaces for women to articulate their demands, every year we organise the Global South Women’s Forum on Sustainable Development - but decision makers don't always accept our invitations to come to those spaces.  They prefer to have more tokenistic representation of southern women's voices in the spaces that THEY convene - and so they lose many opportunities to really know what women's demands are.

Claire:  What would you like to see done by national governments to get the SDGs back on track?

Priyanthi:  Global south women would like to see their national governments change their priorities.  All the national governments have committed themselves to the SDGs, and most of them have signed up to human right conventions that underpin the SDGs,– so being off track  on achieving the SDGs means that they have also failed in their  obligations under international law to protect the rights of all their citizens, including the rights of women - rights to food, to education, to health, to decent work etc  There has been a lot of talk about the importance of ‘trust’ – not protecting citizens rights is a clear way of breaking the trust we have in our governments. 

So what we would demand is that when states are making economic policies, when they are thinking of implementing austerity measures, or reducing taxation, when they are thinking of heavily investing in the military or providing incentives to transnational corporations, they need to check how these policies and budgetary allocations impact on achieving the SDGs and protecting the human rights of their citizens.  This means having the courage to make hard choices, and challenge global institutions that try to ignore/downplay these state obligations

Claire:  What do you expect from the international community? 

 Priyanthi: From a global south perspective, the term international community seems more like a euphemism for the Global North Governments.  From our perspective we think that global north governments should be doing much more than they are to make sure the SDGs and human rights are not undermined in the global south. 

Under international human rights law they also have extra territorial obligations, and many women's groups are holding them to account  - for the abuses to workers and to the environment caused by their companies, for blocking the Trips waiver and access to COVID vaccines, for creating tax havens that facilitate illicit financial flows

In addition, Global North governments serve on the decision-making bodies of international financial institutions whose policies are often detrimental to the achievement of the SDGs and human rights - they have the power to interrogate these policies – which doesn’t always happen

There are also many contradictions in the way the international community works which need to be sorted if SDGs are to be brought on track.   Your geopolitics and your arms trade cannot support conflicts on the one hand and expect to achieve the SDGs on the other.

[time running out reminder!!!]

And finally, the international community requires more coherence - you can't silo the SDGs, the human rights system, macroeconomic policymaking, trade regimes etc as if they were working in different spheres.    They need to work in synch