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H. Al-Bayati: Women and the UN Millennium Development Goals
Written by H.E. Mr. Hamid Al-Bayati, Ambassador and Permanent Representative of Iraq to the UN
Thursday, March 12, 2009
In 2000, 189 leaders from the world’s developed and developing countries launched an initiative to improve the lives of the world’s poorest people by eradicating poverty and its accompanying factors: hunger, disease, the lack of medical care, education, and the empowerment of women.
The resulting eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) formed a blueprint for international cooperation and declared a worldwide mandate for change, with the goals to be met by the year 2015. The Millennium Development Goals are:
- Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger
- Achieve universal primary education
- Promote gender equality and empower women
- Reduce child mortality
- Improve maternal health
- Combat HIV/AIDS, malaria, and other diseases
- Ensure environmental sustainability
- Develop a global partnership for development
Women’s empowerment and development
In many parts of the world, cultural and social restraints keep women from contributing to the welfare of their families. Of the world’s people living in poverty, women form a significant proportion. The perceived value of a woman’s work in the home or as a young bride frequently outweighs the value of her education. Nearly 800 million people over the age of 15 are illiterate, and two thirds of them are women.
This lack of education affects women — and their families — in many ways. While women bear a disproportionate burden of the world’s poverty, they play a leading role in the health, nutrition, and education of the family.
Many women are denied economic opportunities through lack of education or by sexual status, making it impossible for them to better their economic status and secure a livelihood.
With reduced status in their home, community, and society, women are the victims of violence and abuse, primarily at the hands of family members. According to the United Nations Development Fund for Women, violence against women is “the most pervasive human rights violation that we know today.” It is the major cause of death and disability among women 16 to 44 years of age. It is also shown that there is a link between violence against women and the rate of HIV infection in the female population.
Empowering women through education significantly impacts their survival rate and that of their children as well as the overall health and economic welfare of their families. By having an opportunity to acquire an education, a woman also helps to ensure the education of her own children. Seventy-five percent of children in developing countries who are not attending primary school have a mother who did not go to school.
Women’s lack of health care, primarily in the area of sexual and reproductive health, is a factor of education and empowerment. An estimated 529,000 women died from complications of pregnancy and childbirth in 2001. Virtually all of these deaths occurred in developing countries. In the developed world, the overall risk of complications from pregnancy is 15 percent.
Women and girls account for roughly half of the world’s population but form the majority of poor and hungry people.
In south Asia, women are getting a shrinking share of income as the economy grows.
Ten million more girls than boys are out of primary school; two thirds of the world’s illiterate young people are women.
In Pakistan and India, girls have a 30-50 percent higher chance of dying between the ages of one and five than boys.
In Africa, women now account for 75 percent of all young people living with HIV and AIDS.
Women and children in Africa spend 40 billion hours collecting water per year, equivalent to a year’s labor for France’s entire work force.
The disproportionate impact of poverty on women and girls is not an accident but the result of systematic discrimination. The implications are clear. Unless the specific barriers that prevent women and girls from escaping poverty are tackled, progress towards the goals cannot be accelerated.
- On current trends, the goal of halving hunger won’t be met until 2035, 20 years late.
- Forty countries, including Nigeria and Vietnam, risk not achieving equal school enrollments for girls and boys until after 2025.
- The total number of AIDS infections in 2007 was 33 million, its highest-ever level, and global prevalence rates are static.
If the call to action is going to realize its potential, world leaders must:
- Set more ambitious and specific targets on women and girls within the existing MDGs framework.
- Bolster the UN’s capacity to tackle discrimination against women.
- Monitor progress with better data.
- Make aid a more effective tool in achieving equality and women’s empowerment.
Advancing the rights of women and girls is not just the most effective route to achieving the 2015 goals. It is also a moral necessity.
Recommendations for achieving a global alliance for women’s rights:
1. Make achieving women’s rights central to reaching the MDGs. The progress towards meeting the MDGs has been limited. Where data is tracked separately for males and females, it shows that women and girls are being left behind. The key reason for this is the failure to tackle violations of women’s and girls’ rights. Because gender inequality cuts across each goal, this failure is holding back progress on all of the MDGs. For example, halting and reversing the HIV pandemic will only be possible if the feminization of the disease, driven by violations of women’s rights, is addressed.
2. Set more ambitious targets for women’s rights. The third MDG, to promote gender equality and empower women, is ambitious. But despite this ambition, the targets the international community has set on tackling discrimination against women are either inadequate or wildly off track. Girls’ education is vital, but it is only one element of efforts to empower women and girls, and there is virtually no progress on maternal mortality.
3. Strengthen UN capacity on women’s rights. The UN his historically played a vital leading role in setting standards on women’s rights and must be a key player in marshaling the international effort to make them a reality. However, UNIFEM, which is the only existing UN gender body with any in-country presence, is a fund, not an independent operational agency. It reports to the UN Development Programme Administrator and does not have a seat on high-level decision-making bodies. Its total income in 2006 was US$63.3 million, little more than one hour’s worth of US military spending. The UN High Level Panel on System Wide Coherence recommended that a reformed UN should include a “dynamic UN entity focused on gender equality and women’s empowerment.” By combining the existing UN gender bodies, it was recommended that the new body should have a stronger normative and advocacy role, combined with a targeted programming role,” and that it should be “ambitiously funded.” As well as being well resourced in terms of funding and expertise, it is essential that the new body is led by an under-secretary-general, to ensure that women’s voices are heard at the highest levels of UN decision-making.
4. Recognize women’s rights as central to aid-effectiveness. Given the women make up the majority of the poor people, aid cannot be deemed effective unless it tackles gender inequality and the issues that make and keep women and girls poor.
In 2006, more than US$103.9 billion flowed from bilateral and multilateral funding agencies to development-country governments. In September 2008, heads of governments, donors, and civil society gathered in Accra, Ghana for the Third High Level Forum on aid effectiveness. The Forum assessed progress in implementing the five principles of aid effectiveness outlined in the Paris Declaration, signed by donors and governments in 2005.
Although a great deal of international attention is being paid to aid effectiveness, the importance of addressing gender inequality through aid and governance has not been adequately recognized in the largely technical agenda of the Paris Declaration. Yet the five “Paris principles” offer substantial scope.
I am worried that the global financial crisis will have huge impact on the process of achieving the MDGs. The US Congress approved a stimulus plan of providing $787 billion of assistance to banks and other institutions. European countries are planning similar stimulus plans to face the crisis. I think we need a stimulus plan by the US, EU, and international institutions such as the World Bank to assist the process of achieving the MDGs, especially those goals regarding girls and women.
Finally, I will briefly shed light on the situation of women in Iraq. For three decades women suffered because of the Saddam regime’s policy of launching wars against neighboring countries, repression against the Iraqi people, and discrimination against women. The wars caused the killing of millions and injuring many more people. The repression policies caused the arrest, execution, and disappearance of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. Women faced the most difficult challenge of bringing the children up and providing living expenses. Women were deprived from any political rights and freedoms, and no woman was allowed in diplomatic missions or any official delegation traveling outside Iraq.
However, since the fall of Saddam’s regime, women in Iraq enjoy full political rights such as nomination and participation in national, provincial, and municipal elections. The constitution guaranteed that 25 percent of our Parliament members are women, and the same applied to other elections. In the recent provincial elections, women were given seats even if they got fewer votes than men, to observe the quota of 25 percent. Women were nominated as ambassadors in many important capitals of the world, and women occupy many important ministerial and other high-ranking positions.
In addition, the government established a social protection network for supporting displaced families, especially families headed by women, widows, victims of violence, women with disabilities, and unemployed women.
Address at the Women for Peace seminar on "MDGs and the Role of Women," United Nations Plaza, New York, USA, March 12, 2009.