Perpetuating power: a response

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Notes

* The Millennium Declaration came about as a joint effort between the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, World Bank, International Monetary Fund and United Nations. The declaration evolved through a series of UN-led conferences in the 1990s focusing on issues such as children, nutrition, human rights, women and others. It is not possible to narrow down the specific conference in which the actual drafting of the MDGs began to materialize, but in 1995 the UN played a critical role, aware of a decrease in Official Development Assistance by major donors, as did the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. The 50th anniversary of the UN was considered an historical opportunity to encourage international debate about the role of the UN. These UN meetings led to the report entitled We the Peoples: The Role of the United Nations in the 21st Century, which in turn led to the Millennium Declaration. By this time, the OECD had already formed its International Development Goals (IDGs), which were combined with the UN's efforts at the World Bank's 2001 meeting, which formed the MDGs.

† The 12 critical areas of concern in the Beijing Platform for Action were based in a gender perspective and in principles of equality, indivisibility of human rights and recognition of poverty and inequality: 1) the persistent and increasing burden of poverty for women; 2) inequalities and inadequacies in, and unequal access to, education and training; 3) inequalities and inadequacies in, and unequal access to, health care and related services; 4) violence against women; 5) the effects of armed or other kinds of conflict on women, including those living under foreign occupation; 6) inequality in economic structures and policies, in all forms of productive activities and in access to resources; 7) inequality between women and men in the sharing of power and decision-making at all levels; 8) insufficient mechanisms at all levels to promote the advancement of women; 9) lack of respect for and inadequate promotion and protection of the human rights of women; 10) stereotyping of women and inequality in women's access and participation in all communication systems, especially the media; 11) gender inequality in the management of natural resources and in the safeguarding of the environment; and 12) persistent discrimination against and violation of the rights of the girl child.²

* The Women's Watch is a UN gateway to global information about women's concerns and progress in achieving equality, put together in 1999 by online global working groups to gather information on implementation of the 12 critical areas of concern of the Beijing Platform for Action. The members of the working groups represented more than 120 countries and included NGOs, government representatives, inter-governmental organisations and researchers. This effort aimed to collect lessons learned, assess progress made, identify continuing obstacles and share good practices across the 12 critical areas of concern.⁷

* The “Building Solidarities: Feminist Dialogues”, created in 2003, provided a space for feminist analysis and movement-building preceding the Fourth World Social Forum in Mumbai, India (<www.isisinternational.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=283&Itemid=167&date=2007-11-01>). The Global Call to Action against Poverty is a global citizens' campaign in support of poverty reduction as a priority in the MDGs (<www.whiteband.org>). While women's networks such as DAWN had concerns about being part of this campaign, due to its contradictions and public relations hype, they agreed that they could not exclude themselves from a global initiative that had poor peoples' movements in it and which was aimed at creating the broadest possible alliances against poverty. Hence, they formed a feminist task force within it, from which to operate.¹⁰ AWID (Association for Women's Rights in Development) is a Canadian feminist group which has been organizing global conferences for the past 12 years to discuss development from a feminist, transnational perspective and within a rights framework (<www.awid.org>). The Countdown to 2015 Initiative, involving a mix of UN and intergovernmental agencies, donors, large NGOs, and universities, tracks coverage levels for health interventions proven to reduce maternal, newborn and child mortality. To do so, it calls on governments and development partners to be accountable, identifies knowledge gaps and proposes new actions. Overall, the Countdown Initiative can be described as a supra-institutional collaborative effort (<www.countdown2015mnch.org>).¹¹