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Contribution to the High-Level Political Forum on Sustainable Development “Empowering people and ensuring inclusiveness and equality” March 2019
The universal 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development confirms the centrality of gender equality and the empowerment of women and girls to sustainable development and poverty eradication, and for progress across all the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and targets. It envisaged a world in which every woman and girl enjoys full gender equality and all legal, social and economic barriers to their empowerment have been removed.
In addressing its priority and review themes since the adoption of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, the Commission has consistently built synergies between the realization of gender equality and the empowerment of women, and the implementation of the 2030 Agenda. In this regard, the Commission emphasizes the important contribution of women and girls to sustainable development. It has reiterated that gender equality and the empowerment of all women and girls and women’s full and equal participation and leadership in the economy are vital for achieving sustainable development, promoting peaceful, just and inclusive societies, enhancing sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth and productivity, ending poverty in all its forms everywhere and ensuring the well-being of all.
At its sixty-third session, the Commission on the Status of Women considered “Social protection systems, access to public services and sustainable infrastructure for gender equality and the empowerment of women and girls” as its priority theme. In its agreed conclusions, the Commission emphasized the mutually reinforcing relationship among achieving gender equality and the empowerment of all women and girls, and the full, effective and accelerated implementation of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action and the gender-responsive implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. The agreed conclusions draw strong linkages to Goal 5, Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls and its targets. They also extensively align the situation of women and girls with the Goals under review by the HLPF in 2019, namely, Goals 4, 8, 10, 13, 16, 17, as well as other SDGs. The Commission also reviewed implementation of the agreed conclusions from its sixtieth session on “Women’s empowerment and its link to sustainable development”, which enabled Member States to assess how far they have come in the gender-responsive implementation of the 2030 Agenda. This confirms and reinforces the Commission’s echoing of the need for the 2030 Agenda to be systematically implemented in a gender-responsive manner.
