The 68th annual Commission on the Status of Women (CSW68), the UN’s largest annual two week gathering on gender equality and women’s empowerment, took place from 11 – 22 March 2024. Diverse women, feminist networks and social movements converged at the (csw68) to advocate for substantive equality by calling for norms and frameworks that centre gender, economic, and environmental justice. The priority theme this year was, “Accelerating the achievement of gender equality and the empowerment of all women and girls by addressing poverty and strengthening institutions and financing with a gender perspective”. CSW68 also brought together world leaders including two Heads of State, three vice-presidents and over 100 Ministers and 4,800 representatives of civil-society organizations, marking the second-highest attendance in CSW records.
CSW68 ended on 22 March 2024 with the acknowledgement of the need to further engage and finance women’s organizations through robust, flexible and multi-year financing. equality. Globally 10.3 per cent of women live in extreme poverty and progress towards ending poverty needs to be 26 times faster to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals by 2030.At CSW68, governments, civil society organizations, experts and activists from across the world came together together to agree on actions and investments that can end women’s poverty and advance gender equality.
The 68th session of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW68) delivered robust commitments by UN Member States to strengthen financing and institutions to eradicate women’s and girls’ poverty. The agreed conclusions recognize that women and girls living in poverty become shock absorbers in times of crisis, and that further efforts are needed to increase resources to address women’s and girls’ poverty. Having acknowledged that the international financial architecture is not fit for a crisis-prone world, the Commission called for reforms to enable countries to mobilize and invest resources in gender equality. These measures include debt relief and progressive taxation and ensuring that public resources are allocated to address the needs and rights of women and girls.
The Agreed Conclusions also recommended the mobilization of financial resources from public and private sources, strengthening the international financial architecture, ensuring a gender lens in national budgeting processes, and preventing regressive taxation that disproportionately impacts women and girls with low or no income. The outcome document also notes that official development assistance has to be increased to address women’s and girls’ poverty. The Commission also called for the implementation of gender-responsive economic and social policies, including increased women’s representation, leadership and participation in economic institutions, enforcing core labour standards to ensure equal pay for work of equal value, and implementing policies to support women-owned businesses.
Robust, flexible and multi-year financing for locally led feminist movements and women’s rights organizations is critical to address poverty. The Agreed Conclusions also call to strengthen national capacities to collect and use disaggregated data on multidimensional poverty, and to adopt new development strategies towards sustainable economies. These include strengthening inclusive and gender-responsive social protection systems and scaling up investment in the care economy to reduce women’s time and income poverty and expand their employment opportunities.
During the session, the Commission also adopted a resolution on HIV-AIDS led by the Southern Africa Development Community (SADC), which calls to increase investment in gender equality and the empowerment of all women and girls in the HIV-AIDS response. CSW68 adopted, by consensus, a resolution focused on advancing the rights and empowerment of women and girls as part of efforts to end AIDS. The updated resolution 60/2, Women, the Girl Child and HIV and AIDS, underscores the urgent need to prioritize the health and rights of adolescent girls and young women in the context of the ongoing global AIDS pandemic. It recognizes that adolescent girls and young women are still disproportionately affected by HIV due to various socio-economic factors, including gender inequalities, poverty, and lack of access to education and healthcare.
The resolution underscores the imperative of advancing gender equality as central to ending AIDS, and reaffirms the commitments made in the 2021 United Nations General Assembly Political Declaration on HIV and AIDS. The resolution calls for all governments to enact and intensify the implementation of laws and policies to eliminate all forms of gender-based violence, as well as end HIV-related stigma and discrimination against women and girls. It also calls for promoting active and meaningful participation and leadership of women and girls living with HIV in the AIDS response. Attention is now turning to next year’s 30th anniversary of the adoption of the Beijing Platform for Action. The 69th session of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW69) will take place from 10 to 21 March 2025 in New York.