This year’s UN’s Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) priority theme was “accelerating the achievement of gender equality and the empowerment of all women and girls by addressing poverty, strengthening institutions and financing with a gender perspective”. But what does that mean or entail?
Women and girls, in all their diversity, face intersecting forms of discrimination through economic and social barriers linked to factors based on age, race, ethnicity, class, religion, caste, status, disability, sexual orientation, gender identity and other grounds. When discrimination towards women and girls in all their diversity takes place, it happens in an uneven setting, as power relations between genders have kept women and girls systematically oppressed. The focus on poverty at CSW68 was an opportunity to put the nature of poverty at question, in order to shift current power structures and propose participatory, and transparent gender-just processes to ensure that all poverty alleviation measures respond to the lived realities and reflect the demands of women, girls, gender-diverse, and other structurally silenced groups.
As APC Women’s Rights Programme (WRP), we participated at the 68th session of the CSW with the main message of calling for efforts toward the full realization of human rights through a decolonial and structural feminist approach that contributes to dismantling the enduring and compounding legacies of colonial, white supremacist, and hetero-patriarchal systems that continue to perpetuate the oppression of women, girls, and gender-diverse people across social, political, and economic structures around the world. With this in mind, our activities for CSW68 were planned to look beyond mainstream approaches to address poverty. Our strategy consisted on promoting and demanding policy responses that put into question the current power structures and social norms that continue to shape and reinforce violence and discrimination towards women and girls in all their diversity, and the delivering of a more inclusive and equitable approach to achieve gender justice and to make sure that human rights are placed at the center, for everyone.