Speech: Progress to celebrate, progress unrealized – A call for reinvigorated collective action

Speech

UN Women Executive Director Sima Bahous delivers remarks at the launch of the report, "Progress on the Sustainable Development Goals: The gender snapshot 2024", 21 September 2024, UN headquarters. Photo: UN Women/Ryan Brown.

Gender equality, the empowerment of women and girls, and the protection of their rights, is the engine of the Sustainable Development Goals. At a time when we are in desperate need of acceleration across the 2030 Agenda, gender equality is the universal accelerator, par excellence, be it for our pursuit of food security, carbon neutrality, better health, child survival, peace and security, or any other of the crucial objectives and promises we have made. I'm sure you all agree with me.

When we agreed that Agenda, and those goals, we did not necessarily foresee that we would pursue them in the face of crises in which women and girls continue to pay the highest price, not least in the conflicts today from Gaza to Sudan, to Ukraine, to Haiti, to Afghanistan and more.

As always, our Snapshot juxtaposes progress that we rightly celebrate with progress unrealized that we rightly take as a call for reinvigorated collective action.

Women's poverty is finally declining, now below 10 per cent. Girls have made significant strides in education. Positive legal reforms are yielding immense benefits. For instance, countries with domestic violence legislation now have significantly lower rates of intimate partner violence at 9.5 per cent, compared to 16.1 per cent for those that do not.

At the same time, unfortunately, not a single SDG 5 indicator has been achieved. Only 2 out of the 18 indicators are close. Without change, without acceleration, it would take 39 years to achieve gender parity in parliaments, 68 to end child marriage, and an extraordinary 137 years to eradicate extreme poverty for women and girls.

We know this is an unacceptable failure on our collective part in the face of the duty we collectively bear to realize the rights of women and girls around the world. But it is also profoundly self-destructive for humanity as a whole. We are wasting a gender equality dividend at precisely the time we need it most.

Consider that the annual global cost of the education skills deficit is over USD 10 trillion, more than the GDPs of France and Japan combined. Consider that low- and middle-income countries will lose USD 500 billion in economic activity in the next five years if they don't address the gender digital divide. Consider the prosperity spurned, the opportunity lost, the progress for us, our children and theirs that we are wasting purely through the stubborn insistence in clinging to outdated and unnecessary discriminatory beliefs, practices, laws, and policies.

This is all the more exasperating because we know exactly what to do. We know full well how to get girls into school and how education can transform their lives and benefit all of society. The Global Digital Compact is an explicit blueprint to close the digital gender gap, right in our hands. We forego nearly USD 1 trillion in global GDP as a result of gender gaps in farm productivity and food system wages, yet we are perfectly familiar with interventions that empower women small-scale farmers. We could create 300 million new, decent, low-carbon jobs by investing in infrastructure and care services.

And when women lead, the needle moves on critical issues. But, only 9 out of the 133 scheduled speakers at this United Nations General Assembly are women. In one of the most significant electoral years in recent history, 107 countries have never had a woman Head of State.

As world leaders gather for the Summit of the Future tomorrow, they carry with them the responsibility both to women and girls and to us all to make different choices. It falls on us to indefatigably persuade them in whatever way works, not least through the consistent and insistent presentation of data and evidence like our Gender Snapshot, that you have in front of you today.

In 2025, we will mark the 30th anniversary of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action. This is yet another space in which we must drive forward for acceleration. We are proposing priority areas for that action, which we believe offer the best opportunities for that acceleration in areas such as women's leadership, green economies, ending violence against women, peace and security, and closing the gender digital gap.

Let me close with an ask of you. You have in front of you a carefully crafted report that makes the case for accelerated action for gender equality. All of us here have the evidence in our hands. So, I am asking all of you to embrace your role as advocates. We have placed the indisputable arguments at your fingertips. We are equipped with everything we need to persuade a world that urgently needs persuading. And we here are just one part of a global feminist movement that I believe to be genuinely unstoppable.

I ask that you be impatient advocates for a case that is as rock solid as any case could be. Advocates for women and girls and for gender equality as a driver of progress for all of us, across all aspects of the 2030 Agenda, the multilateral agenda and more. I look forward to working with all of you for that end.

I thank you.