2024-2025
The International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) in Cairo, 1994, and the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, 1995, were historic landmarks. ICPD shifted the global framework from population control to sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR), while Beijing set a comprehensive agenda for women’s rights across 12 critical areas. Thirty years later, however, these gains are under severe threat. Authoritarianism, corporate capture, debt crises, and climate breakdown are driving new restrictions, reversing progress that feminists fought hard to secure.
As ICPD+30 (April 2024) and Beijing+30 (March 2025) unfold, feminists from the global South mobilise notonly to commemorate but to resist rollbacks, They highlight ongoing criminalisation of abortion, digital exclusion, migration precarity, and the securitisation of care, while reclaiming power to challenge structural inequalities and colonial governance. These anniversaries are thus, not just symbolic milestones, but urgent calls for systemic transformation rooted in justice, decoloniality, and collective wellbeing.
