Walk Beside Us
This speech was delivered by Srilatha Batliwala at the High Level Thematic Debate on Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment held by United Nations General Assembly in March 2007. She lists the magic bullets popular in the area of women’s empowerment and gender equality: gender mainstreaming, micro-finance focused on lending rather than women’s empowerment, and quotas for women in formal political systems, and how empirical evidence indicates that none of these, singly or together, necessarily empower women. Of great urgency today are programs and strategies that address the invisible, informal, traditional systems - the arenas in which the majority of the world’s women negotiate their lives - which continue to oppress and exclude women and subvert their search for justice. Dr. Batliwala urges the Assembly to work for the implementation of a strengthened and unified gender entity within the UN system, which will have the resources to support gender justice activists and advocates on the ground in developing innovative new approaches and strategies that can create more sustainable transformations in gender relations at the levels where these are most critical.
