Women’s rights are under attack around the globe, with progress threatened in many countries. Yet feminist organisations continue to fight back, mobilising and forming new alliances. At this challenging moment, much can be learned from the success of the global women’s movement which profoundly influenced the United Nations’ current international development agenda.
Agreed in 2015 by 193 governments, this agenda guides global development policies, programs, and financing until 2030. Its 17 sustainable development goals (SDGs) and 169 targets focus on challenges including poverty, climate change, world peace, and gender equality. Unlike the previous millennium development goals, women’s rights underpin much of this agenda.
Amid conservative backlash against women’s rights, how did feminist advocates ensure that the SDGs focused on gender equality and other issues critically important to women? What strategies did the women’s movement use to influence this agenda?
Last year, the International Women’s Health Coalition (IWHC) published a study — “Power Lessons: Women’s Advocacy and the 2030 Agenda” — on precisely these questions. Along with a related, short film, it documents and reflects on the years of analysis, coordination, alliance-building, and engagement with policy-makers that went into shaping the agreement.
UN negotiations have challenging, fast-paced dynamics and are often New York-based, limiting the participation of small and local women’s rights groups particularly in the Global South. This is one of the challenges that the Women’s Major Group’s Major Group (WMG) — a coalition of more than 600 women’s organisations and networks from around the world — sought to tackle.
The group, which is the focus of IWHC’s study, restructured its leadership to include regional representation, and raised money for women from the Global South to travel to attend the SDG talks. Online organising enabled virtual participation. One WMG member said: “It became easy because…