Generation Equality Forum
The Generation Equality Forum held from 30 June to 2 July 2021 marked the 25th anniversary of Beijing Platform for Action on Women.
“If there is one message that echoes forth from this conference, let it be that human rights are women’s rights and women’s rights are human rights, once and for all.”
Despite progress on women’s political representation, economic participation and health outcomes, we still have work to do to translate Beijing’s commitments into systematic, structural, and transformative change.
To ensure that this work is done, the Generation Equality Forum 2021 saw the announcement of close to $40 billion of investments in gender equality from governments, institutions, philanthropy and UN agencies. The forum also launched ambitious policy and programme commitments to achieve a new global five-year action plan to accelerate gender equality by 2026.
The forum was convened by UN Women and co-hosted by the governments of Mexico and France.
Recognising that the health sector has an critical role to play in preventing and responding to gender-based violence against women and girls, WHO committed to:
Increasing the number of countries with clinical protocols focusing on a comprehensive, survivor-centred, empathetic health response for women and girls subjected to violence;
Working with partners to scale up evidence-based prevention of violence against women and girls in 25 countries with high prevalence, guided by the RESPECT framework;
Developing and supporting the uptake by health providers, policy makers and managers of a training course on health responses to violence against women and girls through the WHO Academy;
Establishing a comprehensive database to monitor implementation of the Global Action Plan and regularly publishing prevalence estimates from the Global Database;
Working with sister UN agencies to scale up the availability of essential, multi-sectoral and survivor-centred services with functional referral mechanisms, for women and girls in all their diversity, in at least 25 high prevalence countries;
Supporting the implementation of the Global Plan of Action on health systems’ response to violence against women and girls.
Part of WHO’s commitment, the Gender Equal Health and Care Workforce Initiative, convened with the Government of France and Women in Global Health, is to advocating for decent and safe work conditions for all health and care workers, especially women. The four pillars of the initiative include: gender equal leadership, equal pay, decent and safe working conditions, and protection against sexual harassment and violence. WHO supports the implementation of the International Labour Organization Convention No. 190 on eliminating violence and harassment at work.
In addition, WHO have launched the Shared Agenda Advocacy Accelerator (the Accelerator) to advocate for increasing resources for preventing violence against women and girls. This advocacy initiative is in partnership with Wellspring, Ford Foundation, UN Women and the Government of the United Kingdom.
Violence against women is an urgent public health issue; in some counties in Asia and the Pacific, it has been estimated that up to 68% of women have experienced physical or sexual violence.
To address violence against women in Asia and the Pacific, the Australian Government’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) has committed AU$3 million to the United Nations Population Asia-Pacific (UNFPA) Regional Office to continue the kNOwVAWdata initiative. The kNOwVAWdata initiative is a collaboration with the University of Melbourne and ANROWS, to support the collection of reliable data through ethical and safe measures to inform policy and programme responses for the prevention of violence against women.
Since its inception in 2016, the KNOwVAWdata initiative has provided technical guidance to 15 countries in Asia and the Pacific to conduct surveys on the prevalence of violence against women. The additional funds provided by DFAT will ensure the continuity of this important initiative through to Phase II which will continue into 2024.