Fiscal Space and Mobilising Financing for Strategies to End Women’s Poverty

CSW 68th sessions Regional Consultation

SESSION 2
‘Fiscal Space and Mobilising Financing for Strategies to End Women’s Poverty’
delivered by Gizka Ayu Pratiwi

Your Excellencies, distinguished speakers, honourable members and delegates, colleagues and sisters.

It is a privilege to deliver the statement on behalf of the Asia Pacific CSO Forum represented by 65 participants representing national and regional level organisations from 22 countries.

Today, across Asia-Pacific, multiple systemic, simultaneous and interconnected crises continue to disproportionately harm women, including those with diverse SOGIESC, and other marginalised identities. The allocation of large portions of national budgets to debt servicing, whilst allocating little or no resources to critical gender equality services like Sexual and Reproductive Health, the enforced rollout of harsh austerity measures, including regressive taxation, labour flexibilisation and privatisation of essential public services with either weak, inaccessible or no social safety nets altogether, deprives them of fundamental human rights. It also reinforces their vulnerability to threats which range from large-scale corporate abuse to small-scale, unregulated, predatory micro-credit schemes, all while women’s organisations and grassroots feminist movements grapple with shrinking civic and fiscal space under increasing fundamentalism, militarism and political repression.

We recommend:

Cancellation of all unsustainable and illegitimate debts.
Establishing a fair debt resolution mechanism/platform.
Accessible, participatory and transparent gender-responsive budgeting processes that incorporate gender and sex disaggregated data, respond to the lived realities and reflect the demands of women and other marginalised identities.
Social protection – universal, binding and enforceable by law.
Digital surveillance welfare systems to be co-designed by and made accessible to their intended users to minimise incorrect assumptions and/or design.
Regular Women’s Human Rights Impact Assessments/Gender Impact Assessments of economic reforms, policies and legislation.
Regular gender assessments and reviews of tax policies to identify gender biases and remove discriminatory provisions, and/or policies that could result in inequality of outcomes across gender groups.
Inclusive, democratic negotiations for a UN Tax Convention to end corporate tax abuses, and strengthening domestic resource mobilisation through progressive taxation and abolishing tax holidays to corporations and wealthy elites.
Create a binding, regulatory framework for multi/trans-national corporations, based on international human rights law.