How to Build a More Equal World

Oct 26, 2020 | Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka
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Just as the World Health Organization identified COVID-19 as a pandemic, UN Women launched our analysis of the global status of women’s rights, showing limited and fragile progress in the 25 years since the adoption of the landmark Beijing Platform for Action on gender equality. The year 2020 also marks the first major staging point for the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), five years after Member States unanimously adopted the 2030 Agenda. The pandemic’s impacts have revealed and intensified the precarious situation of women, especially in terms of their economic security, physical safety and access to decision-making spaces.

The coronavirus pandemic has exposed serious problems with the ways we have constructed our societies and economies on the backs of women’s unpaid labour. This uncomfortable insight links to important questions about the kind of world that we want to live in, and how we get there. As we enter the Decade of Action on the SDGs, there is an opportunity to ‘build back better’, with women’s rights at the centre, to prioritise care for people and planet, and to energise progress on gender equality, for the benefit of all.