Keynote Speech
Ms. Eva Burger, Deputy Head, Department For Socio-Economic Equality, International and EU Affairs, Austrian Federal Ministry of Education and Women’s Affairs
Summary
Events like the “Live Streaming” are important to raise awareness for the CSW and its aims here in Vienna.
CSW 60 will focus on ‘Women’s empowerment and its link to sustainable development’ as a priority theme. This directly refers to the new “Agenda 2030 for sustainable devel-opment”.
The “2030 Agenda for sustainable development” was adopted by the UN General As-sembly in Sept 2015. It contains 17 goals and 169 targets for the “5 Ps”: people, planet, prosperity, peace, partnership.
It combines the social, economic, environmental dimensions of development and follows the principle of universality. – “We are all developing countries!”
Gender Equality is a core part of the 2030 Agenda. The Agenda follows a dual approach to strengthen gender equality and empowerment of women:
Stand-alone goal on “Achieving gender equality and empowering all women and girls“ with 9 sub-targets; inter alia ending all forms of discrimination; eliminating all forms of violence against all women and girls; ensuring universal access to sexual and reproductive health and rights; recognizing and value unpaid care and domestic work.
Gender mainstreaming with gender-specific sub-targets in other policy areas/goals; inter alia within poverty reduction, health care, education.
We are now at the beginning of a 15-year implementation process. The empowerment of women and girls is equally a main goal of the Agenda 2030, but also a determinant for a successful implementation strategy. Without empowering women and girls, the 17 SDGs cannot be achieved.
Systematic follow-up and review of the implementation of the Agenda 2030: The follow-up will be based on voluntary country reviews. They shall feed into reviews at regional and global level.
On the Austrian level: An interministerial working group has been set up. It is chaired by the Federal Chancellery and the Federal Ministry for European, Integration and Foreign Affairs.
Cooperation with NGOs, civil society partners, science and academia and the social partners is key to the successful implementation of the SDGs. It is most important to in-clude the younger generations in this implementation process.
The draft for the agreed conclusions of CSW 60 has been presented by UN women in mid-February 2016.
The draft welcomes the commitments to gender equality and the empowerment of all women and girls in the 2030 Agenda. It reaffirms that realizing gender equality and the empowerment of women and girls will make a crucial contribution to progress across all SDGs and targets. The draft also stresses that the achievement of full human potential and sustainable development is not possible if one half of humanity continues to be de-nied its full human rights and opportunities.
The draft deals with 5 thematic fields: strengthening the legal and policy frameworks; enhancing national institutional arrangements; enabling environments for financing gen-der equality and women’s empowerment; strengthening women’s leadership and support-ing women’s civil society organization; strengthening gender-responsive data collection and accountability processes.
