Carmen Capriles (Bolivia) is a founder and coordinator of Reacción Climática, a non-profit organization formed to advance the participation of the youth of Bolivia in finding solutions to climate change. She also is an environmental activist and campaign coordinator for 350.org. She attended DAWN Training Institute in 2007.

For the last five decades an agenda to guarantee women’s rights and achieve gender equity has been put on the multilateral table with very few results. This is mainly due to a lack of political will to implement a transformative agenda that will guarantee women´s basic rights, nevertheless there has been progress made as a result of people movements, out on the streets.

The lack of action to reduce the global gender gap leading to poverty and extreme poverty in a great part of the world, especially in the global economic South where the majority of the population living in poverty, especially in rural areas, are women. This will be the destiny of millions of girls unless authorities start dealing with the root cause of the problem, and stop taking short term measures that in the long term creates more problems and leave women trapped in the poverty self-feeding loop.

The new Sustainable Development Agenda Post-2015 brings back issues that should have being solved long ago, some before this new century began, but after 15 years of this new era we still feel the gender gap in many parts of world is not only prevailing but growing, this wider inequality range leads to a feminization of poverty.

For most of the global North the great challenge of this new agenda will be to establish policies of sustainable consumption and production. It is important to educate populations on local production and consumption with a proper reuse of material, avoiding the big chains of logistic madness that globalization has bred, for example the Transatlantic-Pacific Treaty, to have one product provided to the whole world at a very high environmental cost. Furthermore, regions have to be empowered to be self-sufficient in most of their domestic products, especially food production, especially when women are involved.

One of the great achievements of the Post-2015 process was that for the first time issues formerly considered taboo to discuss, either because they are too painful or shameful, like child marriage and genital mutilation, were put in the table, as well as acknowledging new stakeholders like ageing people, people living with disabilities, people living with aids, LGBT etc but many of these issues are still unsolved under the shadow of hidden agendas.

Greater efforts need to be made at national and local levels to enforce a new sustainable development agenda that not only relies on the established 17 goals and their targets and indicators, but have to be structured to respond to local realities. This is the greatest challenge for women, facing not only inequalities but also the negative impacts of bad environmental management and a lack of access to the benefits of resources exploitation, recognizing these elements is crucial to creating sustainable development policies meant to reduce the poverty gap.

Despite the fact that the challenges for each country are different certain issues have not been properly acknowledged in the sustainable development agenda, for example transportation is a sector that does not take into account women as users or service providers, we cannot talk about sustainable transportation if the needs of women have not been analyzed and solutions have not yet been found, in most regions women still depend on men for transportation and this will need to change in the years to come.

It is also important to acknowledge that the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) represent a major step forward for developing States, even though the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) have not been met, parties have negotiated a new agenda, not only for developing countries to achieve but also for developed countries to do their homework far beyond financing agendas in developing countries and to work more on accountability, equality, and so on.

In this sense the challenge is not only for the Governments to be held accountable to these new commitments but civil society to help the achievement of these goals, acknowledging that women are key to solving the poverty issue is one big step forward, and understanding that reducing the gender gap will also contribute to a better governance not only for the Post-2015 Sustainable Development Agenda but also to have stronger States that can deal with poverty issues more confidently.

The new sustainable development agenda is far from being the needed tool to solve the problems that the world is facing, but one thing is true, a new era has begun. A new era where the major barriers for women are no longer invisible and in that sense a new challenge lies ahead: to defeat these barriers once and for all. This can only be done by empowering women at all levels while achieving equality in spaces that are still new for women and by pushing for a strong political will from Governments to guarantee women’s rights and to participate in developing this complex agenda in order to have a less inequitable world and at the same time a healthier planet. ~