Our news from CSW68: A round-up from Development Initiatives

I’ve just returned from the 68th Session of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW68). CSW is the principal global intergovernmental session dedicated to the promotion of gender equality and the empowerment of women. During the Commission’s annual two-week session, representatives of UN member states, civil society organisations and UN entities gather at UN headquarters in New York. They discuss progress and gaps in the implementation of the 1995 Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action. This year’s priority theme 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’. This connects closely with work Development Initiatives (DI) has been doing to unlock the power of data to enable policies and investments that improve the lives of women experiencing poverty, inequality and crisis.

I had the privilege to represent DI on panels and at roundtable discussions, including co-hosting an event ‘Lessons from Feminist Advocates on Economic Transformations for a Gender-Just Macroeconomy’. We heard from a panel of African feminists that women are confronted by poor macroeconomic policies every day, and are often disadvantaged by a lack of investment in public services due to high debt payments and austerity policies imposed by international financial institutions. You can read more about the events I attended on X (formerly Twitter).

DI has also been working to outline different approaches to transforming the global financial architecture and public financing for development. Global Public Investment is a new system of public finance framed by three universal principles, ‘all contribute, all decide, all benefit’, reflecting a more horizontal approach to addressing the world’s challenges. At CSW we worked with Global Nation to identify how this approach of shifting power and decolonisation is aligned with feminist values.

On the way home, exhausted but inspired by hearing from and standing with so many great feminists, three reflections stood out:

1. It was good to see a call to strengthen national capacities to collect and use disaggregated data on multidimensional poverty. The need to collect intersectional gender data is now understood as critical for understanding how poverty and intersecting discriminations are experienced by women, girls and other marginalised groups. At DI, we have been researching how investments into data ecosystems translate on the ground, with a particular emphasis on foundational data systems that ensure everyone counts and is counted.
2. While the Agreed Conclusions from CSW68 called for an increase in official development assistance (ODA) for gender equality, progress is not inevitable. The latest OECD data on ODA for gender equality (released just before CSW) showed that after a decade of growth there has been a small drop in overall ODA for gender equality in 2022. Only 4% of total bilateral aid could be seen as truly gender responsive (i.e. its principal objective was gender equality). There was a dramatic drop in funding directly supporting women’s rights organisations − to less than 1% of total ODA. In addition, current approaches to quantifying gender-responsive ODA can only capture intentions and disbursements but not outcomes, so we cannot tell if the projects really did make the difference they intended to.
3. Everyone was talking about the need for gender-responsive and intersectional climate finance but there’s a lack of clarity about how to realise this. DI has been developing a methodology to build a climate finance tracker that should be able to trace climate finance across sectors, including gender and health. I had some excellent conversations at CSW with potential partners to initiate pilot projects to support women’s rights organisations to use data and evidence to quantify how much of climate finance is gender responsive and encourage accountability. It’s work that’s sorely needed. Our recent blog shows that in 2022, the most recent year for which there is data, only 0.1% of total bilateral DAC ODA went to projects specifically targeting climate adaptation and gender. To ensure that climate finance is gender-responsive, financial institutions, donors and governments must focus on:
   1. A more coherent and shared understanding of climate financing and how it should be categorised.
   2. Inclusion of and leadership from women in the conceptual definitions to ensure that gender-responsive climate finance meets the needs of those at the forefront, tackling the climate crisis.
   3. Accountability mechanisms (based on these inclusive definitions) to ensure consistent and transparent reporting of both commitments and disbursements.

Around all this, I still found time to listen to DI’s new podcast miniseries 'What are we missing?'. In the series DI’s CEO, Adrian Lovett, speaks with people with deep expertise, including women’s rights activists, taking us beyond the headlines and exploring the missing issues, missing voices and missing data. In New York, I met activists working in these challenging contexts – it was inspiring to hear how, even in the most adverse contexts, women are still standing up for their rights.

At DI, we’re building new and innovative ideas, in partnership, so that our shared visions can become a reality. We are always looking to expand partnerships and funding opportunities to ensure that our work reaches the right people and places, and delivers impacts for those at risk of being left behind. For example, you can read our gender-responsive climate finance concept note: ‘What does truly transformational finance look like from the perspectives of women, girls and marginalised communities?’ And if you would like to hear more about our work, or discuss potential ways of working together, please do get in touch.

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