INTERNATIONAL: Hilary Clinton, U.N. Reflect on Lack of Substantial Progress in Fostering General Equality

While Beijing also called for stronger health care and educational systems, as well as a stronger crack-down on gender-based violence, millions of women still remain deprived of equal access to civil liberties and personal freedoms, as well as safe, secure zones.

Clinton's half-hour speech synthesized many of these issues that have been articulated, in some form, at the U.N. over the past few weeks, and also reflected on Beijing's impact, as well as need for better implementation of its principles.

“Progress that we have made in the past 15 years is by no means the end of the story. It is maybe, if we are really lucky, it is the end of the beginning,” Clinton said. “There is still so much more to be done. We have to write the next chapter and fully realize the dreams and potential that we set forth in Beijing.”

She proceeded to outline the Obama administration's continued commitment to empowering women internationally in three general capacities: Reducing child and maternal mortality; combating HIV transmission with a refocused, gender-sensitive perspective; lessening the effects of climate change, which is likely to plague women and children the greatest.

About 529,000 women die from complications in childbirth each year, while nearly 8 million babies die before or during delivery or in the first week of life annually, according to UNICEF.

HIV/AIDS has chiefly become “a women's disease,” in recent years, Clinton noted, as women between the ages of 18-34 are now most likely to get infected.

And as rising waters erode precious land and destroy valuable sources of grown food, women are the ones who will “have to work even harder to produce food, walk farther to find safe water for drinking,” Clinton said.

Yet the gender gaps in many countries continue to grow stronger in many countries, as governments too often fail to recognize that gender equality benefits not only the women and girls it empowers – it also promotes governmental stability, peace and security, and economic prosperity, Clinton explained.

“The evidence is irrefutable. When women are free to vote and run for public office, governments are more effective and responsive to their people. When women are free to earn a living and start small businesses, the data is clear. They become key drivers of economic growth across regions and sectors,” Clinton furthered. “Women's progress is human progress and human progress is women's progress.”

The U.N. Security Council has recognized women's contributions to promoting peace and security, as well as aiding in ceasefire and peace-negotiation processes in the past 15 years, Clinton noted. Since 2000 the Security Council has passed Resolutions 1325, 1820, 1888 and 1889, which reflect the direct impact war has on women and girls, and the importance of considering the gendered implications of war, like sexual violence as a tactic of armed conflict. They also, for the first time, acknowledged that sexual violence is a deliberate tactic of armed conflict, and that that violence is an international security concern.

Part of UNSCR 1888 was fully implemented on Thursday, when Margot Wallstrom, the Secretary General's new Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict, was sworn in to her position, also a first of its kind.

The CSW and Beijing +15 review, and its accompanying hundreds of events at the U.N. Secretariat and in the surrounding midtown neighbourhood, covered myriad topics and, to some, appeared largely academic and theoretical, lacking concrete action. Yet a common buzz circled around Ban's plan to create a new overarching agency that would pull all women's agencies together. Ban has not said when that entity might take form.

Conferences like these, though, always serve as helpful networking sessions for people who travel great distances to learn from colleagues in the NGO field, according to Lady J.I. Okogun, executive director of Safewomb International Foundation, a non-profit focused on social advocacy for women based in Abuja, Nigeria.

“Other areas must be consideredin order to see progress really accelerating,” Okogun told Europa Newswire following Clinton's speech. “A lot has changed for the better, but what we are doing is still not enough and we have to consider different methods to effect change better. Talking with other women here lets us share ideas and work together in these efforts.”

Okogun also noted that while the past 15 years since Beijing have helped bridge the global gender gap, too little has been done given the considerable time-frame.

“Fifteen years may look small in terms of the age of humanity, but in the terms of the individual woman it is a whole lot of years and if you have to wait 15 years to move to this next step, it could become a whole lifetime of this struggle,” Okogun explained.