WECF becomes Generation Equality Commitment Maker
Joining hands with many other feminist organizations, civil society actors, governments and private sector companies, WECF International has made commitments to deliver concrete results on gender equality to support the Sustainable Development Agenda.
These commitments are part of the Generation Equality Action Coalitions, which focus on delivering progress on six critical areas that underpin equality:
- Gender-Based Violence
- Economic justice and rights
- Bodily autonomy and sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR)
- Feminist action for climate justice
- Technology and innovation for Gender Equality
- Feminist movements and leadership
Commitment 1: Strengthening feminist movements
We commit to increase meaningful participation in decision-making of our feminist partners from 50 countries into relevant regional and global policy spaces, e.g. the United Nations (UN) policy processes on sustainable development, biodiversity, climate, finance and technology, where we co-facilitate the women and gender spaces, to advance their recommendations for gender-transformative laws and policies.
We commit to support and facilitate the meaningful participation of grassroots and young feminists in these spaces by offering capacity-building and financing (where possible) to attend policy gatherings. E.g. by creating our own ‘youth delegations’ at policy spaces, like we’ve done with the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) in the past.
We commit to support local partner programmes in up to 25 countries that promote leadership of women and girls – including trans, intersex, nonbinary people – and their participation in decision-making and address structural barriers embedded in patriarchal, social and economic institutions, laws and norms.
We commit to promote and support feminist leadership within our organization. We commit to continue our ways of working with our partners: taking equality as a starting point and working in horizontal structures instead of hierarchical. We offer (paid) opportunities to young feminists to work with us, as part of our staff or as freelancers. Within our organization we commit to working on the diversity of our staff, by taking this into consideration in our hiring processes for open positions.
We have been bringing together feminist movements for Beijing +25 and Generation Equality Forum (GEF) process, amongst others as part of Civil Society Advisory Groups (CSAG) for GEF. We continue to involve grassroots feminist movements from our region (specifically Eastern Europe, Central Asia, Western Balkans, ) in collaboration with UN Women. See our “Sub-regional virtual consultations on Beijing +25” for examples of activities. We have experience with organizing youth delegations, for example to the CSW64 and Regional Forum Geneva Beijing +25. In 2020, we also launched the Young Feminist Advocacy Toolkit, specifically focused on the Beijing+25 process. We will continue these activities throughout the next 5 years.
Commitment 2: Gender-just climate technology
Through our Gender Just Climate Solutions programme and in partnership with experts from climate technology agencies, we commit to increase the capacity of and investments in our partners technology development and upscaling. This will boost women and girls’ leadership and full participation in climate technology and innovation.
See this for more information about our activities so far.
We commit to include capacity-building on digital platforms and organizing virtual meetings safely as part of our programmes over the next 5 years. We have built extensive experience on this over the last years and will continue to strengthen our capacities with internal technology trainings and exchange sessions. We see this as a continuous learning opportunity as technology and innovation will continue to evolve.
We have organized many safe virtual meetings in the last year, for which we also created a toolkit.
Commitment 3: Feminist action for climate justice
Through our gender and climate programmes, we commit to increase the climate resilience of women and girls in up to 50 countries through supporting local feminist organisations in building capacity and implementing gender-just climate solutions.
We will advocate for implementation of the GAP of the Paris Agreement at national level. In up to 25 countries, we commit to strengthen capacity of women to participate in climate decision-making in their communities, local councils and national parliament, government and institutions, and to promote gender-transformative climate policies. We commit to bring the demands and lessons from our partner civil society organisations into climate-finance processes. We commit to share best practices and prioritise local feminist climate activists, so that they can be supported and scaled up by policy makers through climate funding programmes. We commit to link our local feminist partners work in 50 countries to climate finance and technology processes we are part of.
We commit that as an organization, we will travel more sustainably. In trips to partner countries, we try to avoid flying as much as we can and ensure that we compensate our CO2 emissions. We currently have a CO2 compensation fund for our travels, with which we contribute to renewable energy cooperatives in partner countries led by women e.g. in Georgia. With this contribution, we reduce 1 tonne CO2 per year (one solar heater). We commit to making our purchases (for office, PR, etc.) as sustainable as possible.
We commit to having regular staff knowledge exchange sessions on feminist climate issues.
As an organization, we are actively involved in the Women and Gender Constituency, a global feminist network working on ambitious gender commitments in United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Through this network and our partner Women’s Environment & Development Organization (WEDO), we are also engaged in the process of creating blueprints for this Action Coalition.