Financing for Gender Equity: Challenges and Solutions 10 Years After the Financial Crisis

Financing for Gender Equity: Challenges and Solutions 10 Years After the Financial Crisis

April 25th | H 6:30 – 8PM | Conference Room A

(A UN pass is necessary to attend this event)

Co-sponsors: Civil Society Financing for Development Group, including the Women’s Working Group on FfD, and the Feminist UN Campaign

Co-organizers: Feminist Task Force, Christian AID, Equidad de Genero,Save the Children, International Center for Research on Women (ICRW), Society for International Development

With 2018 marking the 10th anniversary of the financial crisis, women’s and girls’ rights advocates, finance watchers, development officers and allied organizations and networks are assessing progress and setbacks since the 2008 collapse, including specifically on financing gender equality and women’s empowerment, and the mobilization of resources for the women’s rights and girls’ agendas.  With the Addis Ababa Action Agenda highlighting women’s human rights as a critical component in tackling structural challenges to transformation and with gender equality and women’s human rights as a key cross-cutting issue to the entire FfD and the UN 2030 Agendas, the FfD Forum provides an opportunity to take stock on progress. This interactive dialogue will highlight advances and challenges to the financing gender equality agenda, including setbacks within the scope of the ten years since the financial crisis. Panelists from Member States, the UN, and civil society will address the gendered impact of the financial and economic collapse of 2008, including the effects of financial austerity policies at the national level and inter-generational cycles of poverty and inequality for women and girls that linger ten years on.

Key themes for discussion include:

⦁   Pathways and barriers to women’s economic empowerment and the fulfillment of women’s and girls’ rights;

⦁  Advancements in gender-responsive budgets and progressive taxation;

⦁  Progress on inter-generational cycles of women’s and girls’ poverty and inequality, with a focus on those furthest below the poverty line and LDCS.

⦁  Steps the UN is taking towards reform in support of gender equity financing, and how it is encouraging Member States to implement effective gender budgeting at the national level.

Format: Interactive roundtable discussion

Speakers:

1. Ms. Shanchita Haque, Counsellor, Permanent Mission of the People’s Republic of Bangladesh to the United Nations
2. Kate Donald, Center for Economic, Social Rights (ESCR)
3. Mr. Bruno Rios Sanchez, Permanent Mission of the Government of Mexico (TBC)
4. Ms. Zohra Khan, UN Women (*invited)
5. Save the Children Representative– local advocacy on taxation, investment in girls
6. UN Task Force on Gender Equality Financing Representative (*invited)

Discussants from civil society