CARE is really pleased to be organising this event in partnership with the UN High Level Panel on Women’s Economic Empowerment (HLP), UK’s Department for International Development (DFID) and Business Fights Poverty. The HLP panel generated 250 bold and ambitious commitments by organisations to advance women’s economic empowerment.
At this event, the private sector will share learnings from implementing their commitments in their work with other sectors, and we’ll consider how to measure ongoing implementation progress. We’ll be highlighting how important it is to work in partnership to empower women in the economy. And we look forward to seeing the global launch of the HLP toolkits as a practical tool for organisations implementing the HLP recommendations.
We’ll be hearing from UN Women Policy Director and deputy HLP member Purna Sen, who will present on the panel’s outcomes and launch the new toolkits. This will be followed by a dynamic conversation with leaders from Mondelēz International, Citi Research, DFID, leading think tank DoubleXEconomy, CARE International and West Africa Civil Society Institute. The event is being hosted by our corporate partner Hogan Lovells.
Why does this event matter?
As a global community we are still way off realising the Sustainable Development Goal targets for gender equality by the year 2030 – of which women’s economic empowerment is considered central for achieving inclusive growth. Women continue to earn less, bear the burden of unpaid care and domestic work and are largely concentrated in vulnerable and low-paying activities. More than a billion women worldwide lack access to financial services – denied a safe way to save and invest.
This is why CARE has been so supportive of the High Level Panel’s timely and critical leadership, which this year published practical and focused recommendations for all of us to take forward women’s economic empowerment in our work and meet the 2030 global development goal deadline.
In direct support of SDG 5 (Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls), CARE has set our own ambitious target to ensure 30 million women have greater access to and control over their economic resources by 2020. We are doing that by growing women’s access to financial services and livelihoods, fostering decent work, strengthening women’s role in global value chains and supporting women entrepreneurs. And we are doing that in 71 countries, focusing on supporting women from communities with the least economic opportunities. We are proud to work closely with women, governments and private sector partners near and far to achieve our goals of gender justice and inclusive economic growth for women.
For more detail on how we are working to implement the HLP recommendations, including our work to establish a new global partnership on financial inclusion and our efforts to end workplace violence, watch this space for our forthcoming blog series. This will include blogs from CARE experts and external contributors.
- If you would like to attend the event please register through our Eventbrite page.
- If you would like to submit a question to be asked at the event, please tweet your question to @careintuk, using the hashtag #WomensBusiness.
