The annual high-level segment of the United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) opened here Monday with speakers calling for women and girls to be placed at the centre of the
global struggle to achieve the social and economic targets known as the Millennium Development Goals ( MDGs).
This year's focus "allows us to strengthen the linkages between gender equality, women's human rights and non-discrimination as a basis for
progress in development goals, including the Millennium Development Goals,"
said ECOSOC President Hamidon Ali, referring to the eight goals that world leaders have agreed to try to realize before their 2015 deadline.
In his opening address to the meeting, held at the UN Headquarters in New York, a week-long annual meeting focused on issues of development, Ali said that while the third goal relates directly to the empowerment of women, "all MDGs are dependent upon women having a greater say in their own development."
He noted specifically the need for greater cooperation to end violence against women and girls, and the empowerment of rural women as a critical force in reducing poverty and hunger.
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, in his opening remarks, told government ministers that "until women and girls are liberated from poverty and injustice, all our goals -- peace, security, sustainable development -- stand in jeopardy."
Ban noted that this year is a "landmark year for gender issues" with the 15th anniversary of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action which
remains the most comprehensive global policy framework to achieve the goals of gender equality, development and peace -- and the 10th anniversary of UN Security Council resolution 1325 on women and peace and security.
In addition to the annual ministerial review, the high-level segment of the ECOSOC substantive session will include the Development Cooperation Forum, which aims to strengthen global partnerships for development.
The end result of this week's discussions will be a "short and action-oriented" ministerial declaration that can be "understood by the
man-in-the-street," Ali said.
The declaration will serve as a component to this September's high-level summit convened by Ban to try to urge world leaders to accelerate progress
towards the MDGs ahead of 2015.
For his part, Moushira Khattab, the Egyptian minister of state for family and population affairs, told the ECOSOC meeting that recent economic crisis, food and fuel shortages, and climate change have all had a "profound impact"
on efforts to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and promote gender equality.
The global crises threaten future progress towards equality, he said. "Each of these overlapping crises exacerbates existing gender inequalities and threatens to undermine the progress made so far and makes it even more
challenging to achieve the practical realization of gender equality."
At the same time, Khattab called for "an enabling environment for a responsible role of civil society," in order to advance efforts in
empowering women.
With an unprecedented economic and financial crisis, increased food insecurity, oil prices volatility and climate change, development gains made over the past decade are beginning to erode, Ban said in his report tot he high-level segment of the ECOSOC.
Before the onset of the food prices hike, women and girls were already estimated to have constituted 60 percent of the world's hungry and are now thought to be facing more severe food shortages, Ban said in his another report on challenges and impact on gender equality and empowerment of women.
During famines or food crises women and girls typically go hungry first.
Women farmers cultivate more than half of global food production, amounting to as much as 80 percent in sub-Saharan Africa and the Caribbean, and yet they are among the most disadvantaged cultivators because they lack land titles and tenure, are not able to access formal banking and credit. And typically do not benefit from government programs for the provision of
agricultural inputs, technologies and marketing arrangements.
The most immediate direct impact of the crisis on employment is through exports. Women workers are usually the first to be laid off because they
tend to hold more "flexible" jobs.
The crisis could create a lost generation of children whose life chances will have been irreparably damaged by a failure to protect their right to education. Already, gender disparities remain deeply engrained, with 28 countries across the developing world having nine or fewer girls in school for every 10 boys. There has been little progress towards the goal of halving adult illiteracy -- a condition that affects 759 million people, two thirds of them women, the UN report said.