UN Women unites SIDS on forum for economic and gender development

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By Robert Andre Emmanuel

[email protected]

Powerful female leaders arrived at the Nelson’s Dockyard on Saturday morning, having made the trek from the far reaches of the world—some as far as Fiji and other islands in the Pacific — for a Gender Equality Forum, sharing the experiences of small islands’ populations.

The two-day forum addressed a plethora of issues from how promoting a gender equal society could act as an accelerator in boosting small island developing economies to the role of businesses, parliaments, and civil society organisations in creating gender equal societies.

The Bahamas’ Senator Dr Erecia Hepburn-Forbes gave an enthralling summary of the first day’s proceedings, encapsulating the audience with her infectious personality and poignant sense of humour.

“With everybody that got up on this stage, I found salient points, and they called this an Equality Village because that is what we are trying to generate now—a gender equality village and we are all participants in this village,”Dr Hepburn-Forbes remarked.

The Gender Equality Forum, organised by UN Women with partnerships from UNESCO, UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction, ParlAmericas and the Caribbean Development Bank among others, was to complement the SIDS Global Business Network Forum and SIDS Children and Youth Action Summit over the weekend and will look to also support training for female entrepreneurs across Antigua and Barbuda, particularly female entrepreneurs who work at the kiosk at Nelson’s Dockyard.

The SIDS4 conference, which officially begins today, brings together action leaders globally to share more than the experiences of small islands, but to also unite them to collectively tackle issues, whether it is data collection to the effects of climate change.

“I think the discussion today has underscored the centrality of gender equality in meeting the sustainable development aspiration of small island developing states.

“I also want to emphasize that the new program of action that would be adopted this week on Friday, we are not going to make progress unless we make progress on gender equality and women’s empowerment.

“Embedding gender equality in these frameworks is an important milestone but it is not an end in itself because gender equality has been in international frameworks from Beijing to SDGs, but progress has been mixed and I think the importance of financing for gender equality is something that we will need to take more seriously going forward,” Themba Kalua, United Nations Resident Coordinator for Samoa said.

“Women are not a homogeneous group; you have women with different needs—persons living with disabilities, indigenous women, women living in rural areas, similarly with women in SIDS, their needs are different, and we need tailored solutions to meet the specific needs of the different regions,” Kalua added.

The Pacific Community (SPC) Principal Strategic Lead—Pacific Women, Mereseini Rakuita, during the panel discussion on ‘Gender Equality as an Accelerator to Revitalize SIDS Economies’, gave the example of the Fijian government in 2021 in their political leadership to address the issue of gender mainstreaming—a public policy integration of a gender equality perspective across all government action.

“The Fijian Government in 2021 put in place a programme called the Institutional Capacity Development, which basically provided the structure for gender mainstreaming inside ministries.

Some of these ministries have never heard about gender equality and what it could look like in the context of their sectoral work, so it was about capacity building, it’s about teaching the different ministries, what gender analysis looks like, what gender responsive budgeting looks like and for us, in Fiji we passed our first gender responsive budget.

“Each government must take ownership of the gender equality commitments that we take- we cannot pass the buck on that- government must lead, take ownership of it and drive it across whole of society,” Rakuita explained.

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