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This morning, I attended ECOSOC’s special event, “Achieving the MDG’s and coping with the challenges of climage change.” It was of course interesting, as I usually find most things related to climate change, but what I found particularly moving were the comments spoken by the delegate from Belgium (who did not speak on behalf of Belgium, but for the committee for CSW). He outlined how climate change disproportionately and negatively affects women, and spoke about how women can acts as agents of change in the mitigation of global warming.
Of course, this year’s 52nd session of the CSW chose as it’s emerging issue “Gender perspectives on climate change“, where we learned that women’s lives are effected in large part due to their domestic responsibilities. As the moderator’s summary stresses,
In Africa, for example, women have primary responsibility for food security, household water supply, and the provision of energy for cooking and heating. Conditions such as drought, deforestation and erratic rainfall have a disproportionate negative affect on their ability to carry out these duties. As climate change causes African women to work harder to secure these basic resources, they have less time to secure an education or earn an income. Girls are more likely than boys to drop out of school to help their mothers gather fuel, wood and water.
The unequal effects that climate change already has, and will likely continue to have, along the lines of gender, are rarely mentioned. As we move towards mitigation and adaptation to climate change, we must do so with a lens that prioritizes women as the large majority of those greatly affected by climate change.
The 41st session of the Convention on the Elimination of All forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) will be taking place at the United Nations in New York City, commencing on the 30th of June. CEDAW, an international human rights treaty for women, was first adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1979. Since then, 185 nation states have become party to it, including Afghanistan, Chile, China, Iraq, and the Congo. Although the United States of America has not yet ratified the treaty, this has not prevented it from becoming one of the most highly ratified international human rights conventions.
During the upcoming 41st session, the CEDAW committee will review the reports submitted by Iceland, Finland, Lithuania, Nigeria, Slovakia, Tanzania, the United Kingdom, and Yemen. The Committee, upon considering the reports, will also present recommendations for each government and, under the statutes of the Optional Protocol to CEDAW, may further investigate into any countries whose reports they find inadequate due to contradictory or additional information.
The full text of the convention can be found at the International Women’s Rights Action Watch website, which also has good information about how NGOs can participate. Want a historical perspective? Consider ordering and reading “The Circle of Empowerment“, edited by Hanna Beate Schopp-Schilling.
To date, governments which have yet to ratify include Iran, Somalia, Sudan, and the United States of America.
by Ann Tiemeyer
From February 22 – 26, 2008, seven young women between the ages of 21 to 28 years old participated in the first Young Women’s Leadership Experience facilitated by the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA (NCC). The group received intensive orientation about the NCC, Ecumenical Women at the UN, Nongovernmental Organizations (NGO’s) at the UN and the history of the UN Commission on the Status of Women (CSW). More>>
by Jocelyn Tengatenga
The imperative to act on gender equality and development is an integral part of the mission of God. God’s mission and vision for humanity is one of peace, prosperity and justice. We believe that because women and men are made equally in the image of God they are equal players and equal beneficiaries in God’s bounty. This is the new life as God intended it to be, a life of equality which is spelt out in Galatians 3:28, “in Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female for all are one in Christ Jesus”. It is therefore a calling on each one of us as women to be involved in the fight for liberation from all forms of oppression and marginalization. We can only do that if we are united and collectively speak out. As women of faith we have been silent for a long time and now is the time to raise our voices together and join hands in working towards a better tomorrow. As Mercy Amba Oduyoye said,
“As a woman who feels the weight of sexism I cannot go again and again to the stories of the exodus, exile and to other biblical motifs in which the “least” are recognized and affirmed, are saved or held up as beloved by God or at least are empowered to gnaw at the fundaments of the structures of injustice until these fundaments cave in on themselves.”
Read the rest of Josie’s speech here.
Ecumenical Women delegates to Commission on the Status of Women were given the opportunity to translate Ecumenical Women’s input into the agreed conclusion into prayers of confession, petition and thanksgiving during morning worship on Thursday, February 28th.
This document contains excerpts from the draft of the agreed-upon conclusions. Ecumenical Women suggested additions and changes to the draft agreed upon conclusions, followed by prompting questions. Then three short sentence prayers were created from the thought around those agreed-upon additions: a prayer of confession, a prayer of petition and a prayer of thanksgiving.
We hope you might pray these prayers with a deep and committed heart for the sake of the disproportionate number of women suffering abject poverty. On Monday, governments began to determine the language needed within the agreed-upon Conclusions. By augmenting the agreed-upon conclusions in such a way as Ecumenical Women have desired, it is just possible that we will begin to rebuild an economic system which has at its core a desire for more resources for development, more decisions for development, and less injustice in the financial mechanisms, in the hands of those who are unable to access them under the current mechanisms: the poor.
By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Mar 4 (IPS) - When women activists lash out against gender discrimination, one of their longstanding complaints is also directed at the U.N. Secretariat, where senior level posts are still largely a virtual monopoly of men. Despite a 1997 General Assembly resolution calling for 50:50 gender parity in decision-making jobs by 2000, the elusive goal is long past that deadline. A coalition of some 600 women’s groups and non- governmental organisations (NGOs) is now complaining that the pervasive gender discrimination in the U.N. system may also be responsible for the lack of an executive director at a key body dealing with women’s issues: the U.N. Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM).
Since its former executive director Noeleen Heyzer was appointed executive secretary of the Bangkok-based U.N. Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacifi c (ESCAP) last September, UNIFEM has remained headless, but functions under an acting executive director, Joanne Sandler. ”We need an appointment now”, says Ana Agostino, coordinator of the Feminist Task Force of the Global Call to Action Against Poverty (GCAP), who points out that the six-month-long delay is unacceptable. She said that women’s groups were expecting an announcement during the current two-week session of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW), which concludes Friday. But there are no indications it will happen.
For the second day in a row, NGOs have been excluded from observing government negotiations on the Agreed Conclusions of the Commission on the Status of Women. Over 2,000 NGOs have come to New York from around the world to participate in the meeting.
This is a terrible precedent for the Commission, which would not exist in its current form, if not for years of women’s movement and advocacy at the UN. Countless UN agreements provide guiding principles for NGOs and governments to work together, such as the Universal Declaration for Human Rights, the Beijing Platform for action and the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination on Women.
In 2000 governments came together and created the Millennium Development Goals to be achieved by 2015 — but they made a major mistake doing it behind closed doors. It took until 2003 for civil society to join the campaign, and valuable time was lost.
Governments cannot achieve gender equality alone. As the ones implementing gender equality on the ground, NGOs should be considered experts and allies. The CSW is not the Security Council, this is a team effort, and if governments send a message of exclusion to civil society, their most valuable resource, the entire world will suffer.
NGOs have presented a letter to the bureau of the commission requesting that they be able to observe the meeting, and restating that they will follow observer protocols. But NGOs must keep the pressure on and get the word out about what is happening. Click here to download NGO letter to bureau chair
