CSW68 special edition: The battle for women's rights, at the UN and beyond

Who run the world? Girls!

Those are the lyrics to Beyoncé's catchy feminist anthem, but in truth, women and girls don’t run the world. In many parts, they struggle just to exist in it.

It’s a sobering take on International Women’s Month, but one that also lends a sense of urgency as we use this time of year to reflect on the very real strides women have made, and the sharp-edged glass ceilings they keep hitting.

Not exactly known for urgency, the United Nations is nevertheless trying to inject momentum into the push for women and girls’ empowerment with the 68th session of the U.N. Commission on the Status of Women, a two-week confab touching on everything from the plight of women in Afghanistan to the scourge of female genital mutilation, to viewing issues such as climate change, conflict, poverty, and pay through a gender lens.

While everyone agreed on the well-worn platitudes that were a fixture in nearly every session — yes, we know women deserve equal rights — tensions, geopolitics, and emotions energized the talks, which are set to conclude on March 22.

The official theme of CSW68 sounds benign and, well, boring: “Accelerating the achievement of gender equality and the empowerment of all women and girls by addressing poverty and strengthening institutions and financing with a gender perspective.”

Behind the scenes, however, diplomatic, political, religious, and cultural battles over women’s rights roiled the negotiations, which are aimed at clinching a 36-page declaration outlining the path to achieve gender equality at a time when indicators have been trending downward, writes Devex Senior Global Reporter Colum Lynch.

Israeli and Palestinian diplomats brought large delegations to New York to highlight alleged sexual crimes against women and girls in the war in Gaza. Russia and the U.S. skirmished over the impact sanctions have on the plight of impoverished women, while Ukraine proposed amendments underscoring the need to address conflict-related sexual violence.

Read: Global showdown at UN for women's rights as advances falter in wartime

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Looking for a new foundation

Delegations have also been relitigating long-standing cultural and political wars ranging from the role of the family and sexual and reproductive health rights to global taxation and debt relief, according to an internal, 173-page compilation detailing each country or regional group’s amendments.

“The patriarchy is far from vanquished,” declared U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres. “It is regaining ground. Autocrats and populists are attacking women’s freedoms and their sexual rights. They promote what they call ‘traditional’ values.”

Those who promote “traditional” values would of course beg to differ — and they made their presence known at CSW68. In fact, women’s rights activists accused them of interrupting and even “infiltrating” the proceedings, arguing that right-wing, conservative groups opposed to abortion and LGBTQ+ rights were more sophisticated and coordinated than ever.

“Giving a platform, giving access and giving a voice and power to people who are actually trying to regress gender justice and women’s rights issues, is a pitfall and it weakens the language [on] the key issues that we want to actually push the needle on,” Amina Hersi of Oxfam International tells Devex contributing reporter Stéphanie Fillion.

Janet Ramatoulie Sallah-Njie, the African Union’s special rapporteur on the rights of women in Africa, says she felt that an event on financing for safe abortion was co-opted by pro-life groups, who asked questions about protecting children’s lives and prosecuting perpetrators of rape. She says it was “condescending, patronizing, and disrespectful.”

Fiery exchanges aside, when I asked people what they thought of the sessions and speeches, preaching to the converted was a common refrain. Another constant was the fear that given the U.N.’s consensus-driven model, CSW68 — like so many other summits — would produce a watered-down final text, especially on hot-button issues such as sexual and reproductive rights. Yet another universal problem with these gatherings is that they are often held in ridiculously expensive cities in the global north, hampering the ability of grassroots organizations in the global south to attend, even though the discussions are ostensibly meant to address local concerns.

Read: Women’s rights activists and right-wing groups face off at CSW

They listen to me when I talk 'cause I ain't pretending

Still, CSW was a madhouse of people. Side events were jampacked — the floor and I became fast friends. Also, not everyone approached it from a cynical perspective. One woman from San Diego, who underwent a lengthy, competitive application process to attend, said the events were exhausting but eye-opening.

We sat together (yes, shoulder to shoulder on the floor) during a panel on the future of Afghanistan, where activist Mahbouba Seraj elicited rousing applause for her unflinching honesty about life under the Taliban.

“What is happening, in reality, is a lot worse than apartheid, and I want you to know that, because we have been erased — absolutely, completely erased. We don’t even exist anymore,” she said, adding that young boys in Afghanistan don’t even know how to respect their mothers anymore. “It’s the most horrendous thing on the face of the earth to be erased.”

Indeed, it was the personal stories that resonated with the women (and men) in attendance. On that note, I talked to Sierra Leone’s first lady about her experience of being married off at the age of 11. Fatima Maada Bio ultimately gained her freedom by escaping to the United Kingdom, eventually returning to Sierra Leone to become a prominent women’s rights advocate.

And she has nothing but harsh words to say about the practice, which remains prevalent throughout the world.

“It’s very important for people to understand that early marriage, in my own theory, is a legalized form of rape,” Bio told me by phone.

“Being a victim of early marriage, I understand what it means. It kills your dream immediately. Knowing that you are married off to a man that you don’t want, you don’t think about education, you don’t think about planning your life. In fact, you pray deep down in your heart that God will kill you so that this man will not get his way on you,” she said, calling it a crime against humanity.

Female genital mutilation is also viewed by many as a crime against humanity — and it’s on the rise. A new report from UNICEF shows that 230 million women and girls have had their external genitalia, such as the clitoris, partially or completely removed. That’s a 15% jump since the last review in 2016. And lawmakers in Gambia voted Monday in favor of a bill overturning the country’s 2015 ban on FGM — a move that could still be stopped but is likely to become law in what would be a world first.

One survivor, Nimco Ali, tells her story in an opinion article for Devex, writing “I know firsthand about the medical and psychological consequences that FGM has on women and girls. These new estimates showing a huge increase of 30 million more affected is both shocking and personally devastating, especially when we know what approaches work and that we could have prevented this from happening.”

Read: Sierra Leone's first lady gets personal about child marriage
Opinion: 230 million women are affected by FGM. I am one of them

Best revenge is your paper

So what works? Among other things, money talks. So how is the development sector doing in funding gender equality?

At first glance, it looks as if the sector is putting its money where its mouth is. In 2021 and 2022, around $64 billion of official development assistance was committed to programs that had gender equality as an objective, according to OECD figures.

But wait. There are some caveats.

Just because donors say that aid is focused on a particular objective, it doesn’t mean we should believe them, because they tend to be somewhat generous in many of their definitions.

When we start to look at how much aid has gender equality as the principal objective, the numbers start to look way worse. Only 4% of bilateral allocable aid is focused primarily on gender. Meanwhile, ODA to support women’s rights organizations dropped to just $631 million per year, down from $891 million in the previous period, while ODA spent on preventing violence against women and girls was just $563 million a year. Chicken feed when compared to an annual ODA budget of more than $200 billion.

In terms of funding, CSW wouldn’t be a proper gathering without it (or at least the promise of it). One of the more prominent funding announcements was a collaboration between USAID and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to create the Women in the Digital Economy Fund, or WiDEF, a new five-year, $60.5 million investment designed to close the gender digital divide.

How big is that divide? It’s more like a chasm. Nearly 1.5 billion women in low- to middle-income countries lack access to the internet.

Read: USAID-Gates fund targets gender digital divide

You can't fix what you can't see

Speaking of troubling stats, care work is full of them. While integral to economies, it’s invisible in most societies — and it’s women who quietly shoulder the burden of looking after children, elderly and sick people, and their communities.

In fact, women and girls provide more than three-quarters of unpaid care work in the world and make up two-thirds of the paid care workforce. “Paid” is stretching it though, because most of the jobs, like cleaners or health care providers, earn paltry salaries.

To bring the issue to light, a new partnership between USAID, the Ford Foundation, and the CARE Fund will direct $4.8 million over two years to help care workers in five countries — Brazil, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Ghana, and the Philippines — mobilize and advocate for stronger wages, safer working conditions, and gender equality.

“We know that around the world, community care has been underpaid and undervalued. Community health workers have been underpaid and undervalued, and economies can’t run without these workers,” USAID’s Bama Athreya tells me. “And so investing in systems that provide quality, paid care … that allows women, in particular, to be able to leave their homes and engage in other types of economic activity — it’s just huge.”

Read: New USAID-Ford initiative aims to care for care workers

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