Sustainable Funding for Gender Equality – EU – Manifesto – Elections 2014
Author: Womens UN Report Network
Date: July 22, 2005
WUNRN
European Women’s Lobby – EWL
European Parliament Elections 2014
Act Now for Her Future – Commit to
Gender Equality
Sustainable Funding for Gender Equality
Women’s Lobby explains, week after week, the demands of its Manifesto “Act
now for her future, commit to gender equality!“. The second demand of
the European Women’s Lobby (EWL), the largest umbrella organisation of women’s
associations in the European Union, is sustainable funding for gender equality.
Budgets mirror political priorities. Therefore, sustainable funding
mechanisms and resources to strengthen women’s rights and gender equality
reflect the true extent of political commitments to ensuring long term
sustainable development in Europe and in the world. The EWL calls for
sustainable funding for gender equality by ensuring that budgets are gender
sensitive, environmentally sustainable and promotes social cohesion.
The EWL will be closely monitoring the new European Parliament (EP) as they
decide on future priorities and corresponding spending allocations in the next
mandate. The European Parliament plays a key role in supporting women’s rights
in the EU and in ensuring that sustainable funding mechanisms are shaped on the
values and principles expressed in the Treaty of Lisbon: equality between women
and men, democracy, fundamental rights, anti-discrimination, and social
justice.
However, in times of austerity, there is a real danger that equality between
women and men is being side-lined in decisions about public spending. The EWL
has witnessed an erosion of funding to women’s organisations and the
institutional framework that supports gender equality with devastating effects
both in the short and especially in the long term if prompt and decisive action
is not taken now. The emergence of rising inequalities, including gender
inequalities, geographical imbalances, rising unemployment, reduced
consumption, jeopardised social cohesion and rising political instability are
sending clear messages that a new direction for the future is urgent.
The EWL and its member organisations are extremely concerned about the
impact of current climate of austerity on women’s lives and on gender equality
in Europe. The EU funding for programmes, policies and actions to improve
gender equality and women’s rights is particularly vital in times when the
European governments are tackling the crisis through unprecedented cuts in
public spending, which have fallen heavily on public services and social
benefits. In the long term, such policies will result in silencing women’s
voices at a time when they are most needed to be heard. The EWL is
calling on all MEPs, the European Commission and national governments to
guarantee adequate funding for programmes, policies and actions on women’s
rights and gender equality. We are also calling for gender budgeting
to be incorporated at all levels, which consists in applying assessment of
budgets, incorporating a gender perspective at all levels of the budgetary
process (design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation) and restructuring
revenues and expenditures in order to promote gender equality.
Sustainable funding for gender equality is necessary to meet the challenges
of ensuring that women and men are drivers of change towards a more sustainable
holistic socially cohesive and environmentally sound society. This means
funding mechanisms that seek to achieve quality employment, increase women’s
employment rate, improve reconciliation policies for both women and men,
strengthen national care infrastructures, tackle vertical and horizontal gender
segregation in education and in the labour market, combat the gender pay and
pension gaps and the increasing feminisation of poverty, combat all forms of
violence against women, promote parity democracy, ensure women’s sexual and
reproductive rights and health, empower women’s rights organisations, strength
the capacity for gender mainstreaming including in development aid and the post
Millennium agenda. The EWL urges Member States to allocate budgets for
women’s rights and gender equality at all levels.
Investing in gender equality on a global scale is a necessary pre-condition
to make her future a better world for us all.
Women and girls are half of Europe’s population, and are entitled to the
same rights as men and boys. Achieving substantive equality between women and
men, promoting women’s rights and empowering women should be a priority of the
European Union and its Member States. Gender equality is an essential part of
democracy, social justice, human rights and dignity. Our Manifesto “Act
now for her future, commit to gender equality!” develops our vision of
a Europe committed to the realization of equality between women and men. We
urge all candidates to the European elections to endorse it!
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