First Intervention By Abigail Ruane, Women’s International League For Peace And Freedom (WILPF) To The Peacebuilding Commission, 30 June 2017

Countries: 
Global

This advocacy tool is a statement by WILPF's Women, Peace, and Security Programme Director Abigail Ruane during the annual session of the Peacebuilding Commission. This statement addresses the importance of gender equality and how financing brings opportunities for these women to integrate in the peace process.  

Read or download the advocacy tool below. 

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As we have heard today, gender equality and conflict prevention are critical for sustainable peace.

The Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) has worked for over one hundred years to move from political economies of war to political economies of gender justice and peace. My colleagues are even now working next door to ban nuclear weapons as a part of our work to stigmatise war and move instead toward positive peace based on women's human security and livelihoods.

As the Agenda 2030 discussions recognise, it is not any kind of development that promotes sustained peace, but Sustainable Development or development that promotes human rights, including women's human rights and protects the environment. Indeed, traditional development does not always lead to gender equality, although gender equality does support development.

Financing sustained peace therefore requires putting local women's voices and human rights at the core of all of our work.

In this regard:

  1. We commend the Peacebuilding Fund in realising the 15% target on gender equality and in developing a gender strategy as called for in the 2015 Global Study on 1325. We call on the PBF to increase this target, such as to 30%, in line with the WPS Strategic Results Framework, or 50% or 100% as might be expected under the Convention on the Elimination of All forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW);
  2. We call on donors to require the same targets on gender as under the PBF across all other UN Funds;
  3. Recognising that women civil society are critical partners for peace, we call on donors to further require that gender strategies are developed and implemented with civil society, including women civil society across all UN funds;
  4. Finally, we call on any initiatives done through the UN-World Bank partnership to ensure that investments strengthen, rather than roll-back, social safety nets supporting women’s livelihoods, so as to respect, protect and fulfil women’s social and economic rights; and to take action to hold private sector actors accountable to women’s human rights standards.