by Menka Goundan, Programme Director, ARROW

The 68th session of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW68) will take place from 11 to 22 March 2024, bringing together representatives of Member States, UN entities, and ECOSOC-accredited non-governmental organisations (NGOs) from across the world to discuss the priority theme of ‘accelerating the achievement of gender equality and the empowerment of all women and girls by addressing poverty and strengthening institutions and financing with a gender perspective’. ARROW and her partners began their advocacy on CSW68 during the Seventh Asian and Pacific Population Conference,which took place in November 2023. During this convergence, we submitted a written submission to the UN Women towards the CSW68.

Gender inequality is a serious threat to the achievement of sustainable development goals and other commitments, including the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action. Poverty has been a significant effect, catalyst, and cause of the situation, often faceted in dimensions of poor access to sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR), increased burden of reproductive and care labour upon women as well as children, early and forced marriages.

Systemic issues such as inequality under the law, social marginalisation, and a lack of sexual and reproductive health care are the biggest barriers to any country’s development. One key solution is gender-responsive budgeting, which should become the norm worldwide. The primary source of funding for healthcare services, including sexual and reproductive health, should be included in the public health budgets, not just in the private sector resources. ARROW’s research in the Asia-Pacific region has shown that privatisation, especially in the health sector, has led to greater out-of-pocket expenses for health services, not to savings.

The World Economic Forum states that half a billion people in the Asia-Pacific region are multidimensionally poor. These people not only face monetary poverty but also face barriers to accessing education and basic infrastructure services. To investigate the face of our diverse and intersectional lived experiences of poverty exacerbated by global financial institutions, CSO representatives from Asia-Pacific gathered (physical and virtual) in Bangkok from 4 to 5 February 2024 for the Asia Pacific Regional CSO Forum preceding the Asia Pacific Regional Consultation.  The CSO forum gathered 65 representatives from regional and national organisations from 22 countries who highlighted the following issues and recommendations.

Poverty

Every day, women and girls grapple with poverty, institutional discrimination, and bias in a very complex way, which is compounded by our intersectionalities and diversities that add to the unique ways in which women and girls experience poverty. The importance of addressing the economic structure is not only from an economic perspective but also to understand poverty from social, economic, and political perspectives. As countries across Asia and the Pacific are compounded by the issue of climate change, poverty is being further exacerbated since frequent and intense climatic events and changes in weather, crop, and marine ecosystem patterns are causing severe losses to livelihoods and infrastructure. This increases the burden and likelihood of state, household, and individual indebtedness. Women are more likely to be disproportionately affected as an informal labour workforce and contributors to the unpaid care economy.

Multiple and intersecting forms of discrimination disproportionately impact the most marginalised, which include but are not limited to rural women, Dalit women, migrant women, indigenous women, women with disabilities, and diverse sexual orientation and gender identity groups.

Recommendations

• Ensure access, availability, affordability, adaptability and quality of services that address the impacts of climate change and that the design, development, implementation, monitoring, and evaluation of all climate-related policies and services including SRHR.
• Improve public investment in health and develop social protection systems including universal access to health to ensure sexual and reproductive rights for all women and girls, especially the most marginalized
• Recognize, reduce and redistribute the unpaid care work burden on women by increasing national budget allocations for public services and bringing in equal pay policy, skills upgrading for women and opportunities for decent work.
• Ensure an enabling environment for civil society and commit dedicated resources to support and enable engagement. Representation, active and inclusive participation requires core, flexible, and sustained funding for feminist networks and grassroots organizations.
• Strong measures need to be taken to fulfill and protect women’s Human Rights as enshrined in global agreements, including the Beijing Platform for Action, International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD), CEDAW and other Human Rights Standards

Financial Systems

Financial mechanisms have shifted from giving grants to countries to lending loans, leading to more indebtedness. At a time when conflicts, natural disasters, and climate change are impacting countries, we see the downsizing of national budgets for population development, including budget cuts for national women’s machineries, sexual and reproductive health services, and social protection. We continue to witness a large proportion of national budget expenditures being put towards national debt financing that accompany harsh austerity measures that have been imposed by international financial institutions.

Small to medium businesses and microfinance schemes designed to lift women out of poverty often fall short in times of crisis where high interest rates on loans cannot be repaid due to a lack of operation. Many loans do not include insurance or safeguards or are attached to microloans for women.

Recommendations

• Accessible, participatory and transparent gender-responsive budgeting processes that incorporate gender and sex disaggregated data, respond to the lived realities and reflect the demands of women and other marginalised identities.
• Periodic women’s human rights impact assessments of economic reforms.
• Social security – universal, binding and enforceable by law.
• Implementation of progressive taxation and abolishing tax holidays to corporations and wealthy elites, as well as mechanisms allowing illicit financial flows and tax havens.
• Create a binding, regulatory framework for multi/trans-national corporations, based on international human rights law.

As states from Asia and the Pacific converge and prepare for CSW68, we must recognise that addressing poverty is not only based on national institutions and mechanisms but also part of the larger-scale global financing systems and architecture that impact countries’ global debt and its impact on strategies, social protections, and financial investments. We need to hold institutions accountable to safeguard the vision that they were established for, which was to uphold the universal declaration of human rights and its principles.