19th Gender Summit - Global for SDGs

In September 2019, the Secretary General of the UN, Antonio Guterres, launched the Decade of Action plan to accelerate delivery of the Sustainable Development Goals. He urged all actors to dramatically increase the pace and scale of SDG implementation efforts. The UN 2020 SDG Progress Report has pointed to a number of problems in achieving all SDGs, referring specifically to SDG 5, the report states that: “the promise of a world in which every woman and girl enjoys full gender equality and all legal, social and economic barriers to their empowerment have been removed, remains unfulfilled”. The Gender Summit community’s concerns that the implementation of the UN SDG agenda might fail women, society and environment if the role of gender was restricted to the issues of empowerment and human rights,  was shaped during the 6^th Gender Summit – Asia Pacific in Seoul, in August 2015, and expanded later during the 10 Gender Summit – Asia Pacific in Tokyo. Gender knowledge (standing for both biological and socio-cultural aspects) can greatly help verify claims of equality in SDG policies and interventions, as well as pinpoint the sources and consequences of disparities in outcomes for women and men.  The objective of GS19 is to involve expert in gender-SDG areas to identify gender knowledge that can be applied already and the knowledge that is still missing but is necessary to accelerate progress across all SDGs during the Decade of Action, ensuring that the improvement made will benefit women and men equally.