In addition to a meeting with Her Excellency Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, President of Liberia at which five vulnerable groups (Children; Women; Farmers, workers, traders, the informal sector; Youth; and Aged and disabled people) addressed the outcomes of the Forum, the CSO 2-day Pre-Consultative Forum, seventy CSO met with all members of the High Level Panel (HLP) in a ‘town hall’ meeting.
The ‘town hall’ meeting was co-chaired by Mrs Namhia Mniki-Mangaliso, head of the African CSO Secretariat, and Mr Charles Abugre, Head of UNMC Africa. Professor Gita Sen presented the outcomes of the CSO Consultation. Other speakers included a Liberian woman farmer, an 11-year old girl and a spokesperson for youth.
The final communiqué includes extremely favourable wording on our issues including explicit references to population dynamics and sexual and reproductive health and rights (see key paragraphs below)
2 Cross-cutting approaches
(para 4) Harsh economic conditions interact with longstanding social inequalities, biases and discrimination, as well as with key aspects of population dynamics such as migration, urbanisation and changing age structures towards larger numbers of young people in some cases and many older people in others to determine who is most severely affected. This includes children, girls and women, subordinated and oppressed castes and racial/ethnic groups, indigenous or people with disability, people living with HIV, sexual minorities, migrants and sex-workers, as well as widows, and older people. The existing social and economic inequalities faced by these groups as well as by pastoralists, small- scale farmers and informal traders are being intensified by current growth models. It is these people whose capabilities need to be supported. Their human rights, including their economic, social, cultural, sexual and reproductive rights need to be protected, promoted and fulfilled.
(para 7) We call on the HLP: to support increase# resources to build people’s capabilities through quality education, skills development and training, access to finances and information, and health including sexual and reproductive health especially of adolescents; to insist on the collection of disaggregated data including by age and sex to strengthen the implementation of laws, policies and programs; to ensure strengthened infrastructure and technology for improved production, communication and exchange among people, better access to markets and innovation and access to all social services; to ensure that the challenge of rising violence against girls and women, especially sexual violence, is prioritized and addressed; and to recognize through strengthened policies and programs the central role of women’s unpaid work in caring for people and supporting human development.
3 Empowering people to become agents of change
We call on the HLP to address the following specific needs of particular groups:
Bullet point 1: the causes of structural poverty among children in various contexts; good governance and accountability around child rights and protection; and enabling children to participate in economic transformation through initiatives that promote quality education for girls and boys, health care, sexual health, information, adequate nutrition, and services for children including those with disabilities or HIV, and protection of children from all forms of violence and exploitation including early and forced marriage;
Bullet point 2: realize the potential of the demographic dividend through comprehensive youth policies that include provision of more and better education, support for young people to obtain decent and well/paid jobs, access to finance and knowledge to become innovators and entrepreneurs, as well as the ability of all young people, especially adolescents to obtain comprehensive sexuality education, and sexual and reproductive services, and to empower and resource girls to prevent teenage pregnancies and violence, and provide sensitization and training for boys to promote gender equality and prevent violence;
Bullet point 3: the achievement of gender equality, the protection of women’s human rights including sexual and reproductive rights and support for women’s empowerment are critical to the success of the entire post 2015 development agenda; the post 2015 development agenda should include a reinforced stand/alone gender equality goal and expanded gender targets and indicators across the entire framework. Failure to do so would reverse the gains of the last 20 years;
Bullet point 6: reform labour laws and policies to ensure full and decent employment for all and that all workers including disabled workers obtain a living wage, and support for freedom of association, collective bargaining and social dialogue for decent work; to urgently address the human rights of women workers to equal wages, maternity leave, child care, safe and decent working conditions including clean toilets, private spaces for breast/feeding, adequate rest breaks, the prevention of practices such as virginity tests, and protection from sexual violence in the workplace;)
For further reports on the CSO Outreach with HLP members in Monrovia, and the full text of the Communiqué see the Ask Africa Now website.