Seven years into implementation since its adoption in 2015, the 2030 Agenda targets remain elusive and worse, the majority of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) have regressed due to the COVID-19 pandemic in the last two years. According to the 2022 Asia Pacific SDG Progress Report produced by the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (UN ESCAP), with the current pace of government efforts and available data, the SDGs will be likely achieved in 2065. This presents a very bleak picture, and with the current commitments of governments and a dominant profit-oriented economic system, genuine development for the people is still far from being a reality.
This year, the six (6) APWLD partners for its program on National Monitoring of Sustainable Development Goals and Development Justice for the year 2020-2021 have concluded and shared their Peoples’ Development Justice Reports, which contain their 18-month journey of monitoring issues and situations of grassroots women in relation to the localization, implementation, and achievement of the SDGs in their contexts.
The monitoring allowed them to dive deeper into the grassroots women’s realities of multiple burdens due to systemic barriers, as well as analyze further the root causes of such structural issues. The process also allowed the partners to reflect and strengthen their work at the local level.
“For the SDGs to be successful, we need to take a bottom-up approach. We have to reach the common people, particularly the excluded ones.” Marina Pervi, Initiative for Right View, Bangladesh
The monitoring of the SDGs is critical in determining the realities at the ground level. In the past years of the SDG review and monitoring, the lack of data and even the process itself being voluntary shows the dwindling or lack of commitments of the member states. In the past two years, the pandemic has also exposed the already dire situations of the most marginalized, particularly in health care, education, and gender equality. In this context, we look at the 2030 Agenda as a tool for the people to hold their governments accountable for these inactions.
On the ground, the women are organizing. The APWLD Monitoring Programme also aims to support movement building and harness the power of the people in demanding genuine sustainable development. From organizing women workers in carpet factories in Nepal to home-based and domestic workers in Pakistan and to indigenous and rural women in Indonesia and Vietnam, movement building is apparent, and effective advocacy work results in different forms of development justice in practice.
“We raised our various issues at the provincial and federal government, including the lack of a database on women in informal work. We had a discussion with social security institutes on the inclusion of women in the informal economy. We were able to successfully lobby for the inclusion of women in the informal sector in the national harassment law, now we are lobbying for amendments in provincial laws. Our recommendations have also been raised as part of the UPR and VNR processes. We are currently in the process of generating recommendations on micro-financing for women.” Ume Laila Azhar, HomeNet, Pakistan
The Peoples’ Development Justice Reports 2020-2021 shares these journeys and stories of resistance and movement building in the pursuit of development justice in the region.
