Currently, Member States, the UN system, civil society organizations, academia, private sector and businesses, research institutions and other stakeholders around the world are engaged in various processes to negotiate a new global framework for sustainable development – the post-2015 development agenda. Cognizant of the pitfalls of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), including the lack of focus on realizing women’s rights in the goal of promoting gender equality and women’s empowerment, it is essential that the future development agenda be explicitly shaped by, and grounded in human rights, economic justice, peace and environmental sustainability to ensure gender equality, the realization of women’s rights and women’s empowerment.
Shifts and realities on the ground, such as the deepening and widening inequalities within and between countries, ongoing and new conflicts, increasing militarization, surveillance, intensification of natural disasters, gender-based violence, increases in human insecurity, and retrogression in the realization of human rights for all, make it clear that the post 2015 sustainable development agenda must focus on the enabling environment and economic structures that limit the realization of women’s rights and social justice. Progress towards ending poverty, hunger, inequalities from an intersectional approach, the prevention and elimination of all forms of violence against girls and women as well as links between gender-based violence and impunity, militarization, military spending, forced migration, displacement, and expropriation of livelihoods especially for rural and indigenous women, and the prevalence of small arms must be addressed if meaningful gains are to be made.
