Young Women's Caucus Statement to CSW 58
Young Women’s Caucus combined oral statement
The world stands at a critical juncture. While the MDGs played an important role in global poverty reduction, a disproportionate amount of women and girls have been left behind. Today, on behalf of the Young Women’s Caucus, I will outline how we can all learn from the challenges and achievements in the implementation of the MDGs and ensure the post- 2015 development agenda captures the needs, assets and aspirations of us, the world’s young women, and leaves no-one behind.
Adolescent girls are the world's most economically vulnerable group; significantly more so than adult women or adolescent boys. Persistent discrimination and entrenched gender disparities remain a major driver of poverty for these young women. Even in the 21st Century, we still face significant gender-based violence, with half of all sexual assaults committed against girls under the age of 16. We still face higher rates of HIV infection, unwanted pregnancies, child, early and forced marriage and harmful traditional practices such as female genital mutilation. Girls and young women face the double discrimination of their sex and age but this is exacerbated for marginalised groups such as young women living with disabilities, LGBTQI communities and those living in conflict zones, among others. This is not acceptable.
The post-2015 development agenda represents a vital opportunity to bring about a transformative change in the lives of the world’s young women and their communities. For this to happen, girls and young women must be central to the new development agenda.
The Young Women’s Caucus calls for a standalone goal on gender equality and empowerment that adopts a life-cycle approach as well as gender to be mainstreamed under all other goals. This will ensure the new agenda empowers girls and women at different stages in their lives so the issues that face us, as young women today, will not cripple our progress as women of the future.
We must: eliminate violence against girls and women, including harmful traditional practices; have equality in meaningful decision-making at all levels – in both the political, social and economic arenas and in the private domain; have access to quality education at all levels, including non-formal education; have universal access to health services which are non- judgemental, confidential and evidence-based, including sexual and reproductive health and rights. We must eliminate deeply-rooted discriminatory social norms, practices and stereotypes that prevent us from enjoying the full spectrum of our human rights.
The framework must acknowledge the cross-cutting nature of these issues for the world’s 860 million young women, by including specific targets which ensure national accountability. Data collected must be disaggregated by sex and age.
We are more than statistics; we are people whose human rights have to be at the core of any transformative agenda.
Our voices must count in shaping the future of humanity.