Harris outlines US plan to strengthen gender equality at UN event

U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris told United Nations members Wednesday that the country has made commitments to gender equality that will have a “tangible” impact on global efforts to strengthen democracy and encouraged other leaders to protect women and girls as the world recovers from the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Democracy is in peril,” she said during a virtual appearance at the Generation Equality Forum happening in Paris this week. “Strongmen have become stronger. Human rights abuses have multiplied. Corruption is undermining progress as misinformation is undermining public confidence.”

Harris added that women and girls are among those who suffer when democracies fail and said gender equality would help strengthen pledges world leaders made at a recent summit of the G-7 group of nations to “unite behind the principles of democracy.”

The U.S. hopes its commitments, the details of which were released Wednesday, will yield “real, tangible” results, such as helping women gain access to capital and reproductive health care, as well as reducing gender-based violence, according to Harris.

The U.S. approach includes launching the first U.S. National Action Plan on Gender-Based Violence in 2022, in coordination with efforts to update the 2016 U.S. Strategy to Prevent and Respond to Gender-Based Violence Globally.

President Joe Biden’s administration also is requesting $1.2 billion for international gender programming in fiscal year 2022 and plans to double the annual investment of the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief in the DREAMS — Determined, Resilient, Empowered, AIDS-Free, Mentored, and Safe — partnership, which operates in Haiti and 14 African countries.

UN Women, which convened the forum, said Wednesday that the event has already generated more than $40 billion in new financial commitments, including aid from governments, philanthropic organizations, and the World Bank. That amount represents “the largest-ever collective infusion of resources into global gender equality,” according to a statement.

Canada said it would commit $100 million in new funding for care work in low- and middle-income countries that receive Canadian aid and nearly $80 million for women and girls through so-called action coalitions.

Among the philanthropic commitments was a pledge of $2.1 billion from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to promote gender equality globally over five years. It’s one of the largest single commitments the foundation has made in its two decades of operation. The Ford Foundation also pledged $420 million to address gender disparities that it said had only increased over the past year.

In her speech, Harris said the U.S. commitments would improve womens’ lives domestically and internationally. She has been heavily engaged with this issue since the Biden administration took office in January. In March, she also confirmed the country’s commitment to women’s rights at a session of the Commission on the Status of Women and became the highest-ranking U.S. official to ever address the U.N. at the event.

Her participation in U.N. events and remarks about U.S. engagement on gender equality have been welcomed by those who see it as a departure from the previous administration’s approach to womens’ education, health care, and economic issues.

Earlier this year, Biden rescinded the Mexico City Policy, or “global gag rule” — which blocked the use of U.S. foreign aid in performing or promoting abortions — and created a White House Gender Policy Council.

“Already we are seeing a tremendous willingness from the White House, in the way that they are thinking about the Gender Policy Council, to really incorporate what we’re learning from this process,” said Nicolette Naylor, the Ford Foundation’s international program director for gender, racial, and ethnic justice. The Ford Foundation is co-leading the forum’s action coalition on gender-based violence, which aims to end violence targeting women and girls such as physical and sexual assaults and female gential mutilation.

And yet Harris’ emphasis on gender equality as part of democracy-building was surprising, considering that the U.S. is still, in many ways, falling behind other countries in this area, said Lauren Leader, CEO at All In Together, a nonpartisan women’s civic education organization. She noted that the World Economic Forum continues to rank the U.S. behind dozens of other countries on gender equity. Also, the U.S. continues to be among the nations that has never had a woman in its top leadership position, she said.

“I think it’s a particularly challenging moment for the U.S. to be calling on the rest of the world to act,” said Leader, who is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

However, Leader said the stakes were high for Harris at this event, which is seen as the successor to the 1995 Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, where then-U.S. first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton famously declared that “human rights are women’s rights, and women’s rights are human rights.”

“I think Kamala had big shoes to fill in this particular moment because Hillary Clinton’s speech was so iconic,” Leader said. “That’s a very tall order to fill in five minutes and, I think, almost impossible actually.”

Clinton also was present at the forum, which was co-hosted by French President Emmanuel Macron and Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador and attended by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, among others. Mexico held the first part of the event in March.

Clinton said that “what we hope is that out of this forum will come the same level of commitment ... to continue the progress that was started and spread throughout the world 26 years ago.”

More than 100 countries signed on to the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action during the Fourth World Conference, but experts have said those commitments lacked accountability.

That criticism was top of mind when the U.N. started planning the Generation Equality Forum, which was originally slated to happen last year, said Lopa Banerjee, chief of the civil society section at UN Women. It was postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

“We were leading up to 2020 as the commemoration point,” she told Devex. “And as we were leading up to it, the assessment was clear that in these intervening years, yes, there has been some progress, there have been laws and policies — and the most progress notably in poverty reduction, in girls’ education — but progress has been slow and unsustainable.”

For example, she said that while COVID-19 lockdowns had led to more incidents of gender-based violence, rates were also high prior to the pandemic. In 2019, nearly 650 million women and girls worldwide experienced violence from an intimate partner, she said. Also, the gender pay gap remains as high as 45% in some countries, according to Banerjee.

She said part of the goal of this week’s forum will be to ensure that there are measures in place to help the U.N. track progress on gender equality commitments. The forum will put forward an implementation agenda based on the commitments, she said.

Along with member states, philanthropies have vowed to dedicate large amounts to the effort. The Gates Foundation’s $2.1 billion commitment will go to three core areas: building women’s economic power, boosting health and family planning, and “accelerating women in leadership.” The foundation plans to spend $1.4 billion on family planning and women’s health with the goal of providing better access to contraceptives and reproductive health servces — which have been cut or diminished during the pandemic.

The foundation released new data Wednesday that it said showed the “pandemic-driven inequality is growing at an alarming pace.”

Darren Walker, president at the Ford Foundation, called the forum a “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity” to build an equitable future.

“The pandemic has disproportionately affected women and girls and underscored how much more we all must do to address and achieve gender equality with greater urgency,” he said.