Gender inequality has been one of the most complicated and intractable issues for centuries, and the fight against it has been ongoing for generations. Substantial progress has been made over the past decades, but the status quo remains lackluster. Around the world, women are overly represented among the poor, among victims to gender-based violence, among the family labor responsible for fetching water and fuel, while underrepresented among science researchers, among entrepreneurs, among check-writers.
The gender imbalance remains evident, in every dimension, especially at a time when socially created vulnerabilities are compounded by climate change and digital transformation. To close the gap, stronger policies and greater investments are needed. Of equal importance, policies and investments complement and interweave each other. While policy measures have aggressively been carried out at local, national and international levels in recent decades, investment and financing tools are lacking. While global assets under management totals around $100 trillion, the investment in tackling gender disparities is meager. Women and girls across many countries are facing systematic obstacles in gaining access to financial resources, let alone in getting investment for their own businesses. The finance gap for women entrepreneurs stands at a whopping $1.7 trillion, according to the World Economic Forum.
Progress in prioritizing investments in women and girls has been made over the years, which, however, is too slow to effect substantive change. Gender parity projects accounted for only 4 percent of official development assistance between 2020 and 2021, standing at $5.7 billion. The prospects for future investment in women seem gloomy, as 75 percent of countries are likely to cut their public spending by 2025 owing to conflicts and price spikes in food and fuel. Austerity policies will inevitably squeeze expenditure used on women and girls. If the current trends continue without urgent, proper inference, the situation will grow even more alarming and precarious. For instance, 360 million women and girls will live in extreme poverty by 2030, and climate change could push additional 158 million females into poverty, which is 16 million more than males.
As the 68th session of the Commission on the Status of Women is being convened at the United Nations (UN) headquarters in New York, a forum with the same theme of this year’s International Women’s Day – “invest in women, accelerate progress” – was held in Beijing by UN Women China, the Center for China and Globalization (CCG) and the Global Development Promotion Center of the China International Development Cooperation Agency (CIDCA). At the symposium, representatives from the UN and other international organizations, government officials, academics and business leaders underlined the importance of public and private financing in advancing gender equality and discussed how China, with the second largest female population in the world, leverages financial resources for gender parity by working with different stakeholders worldwide, diversifying sources of investment and introducing innovative financing mechanisms. Through deepened international cooperation, China is exploring different ways of financing to deal with both traditional conundrums like female poverty and emerging challenges such as climate change, with an aim to support women to thrive in sustainable economies.
The following are excerpts of their speeches at the symposium, which have been edited and condensed for clarity and brevity.
Smriti Aryal, UN Women’s country representative in China
As UN Women, we have been partnering with China on many of these dimensions in China and globally. One example is our partnership with the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) and the provincial department of agriculture and rural affairs at the women’s federation in Hunan Province, where we have reached almost 70,000 people and 5,000 female-headed households across 10 pilot counties to develop capacities and access to resources for climate-smart livelihood and entrepreneurship development, securing nearly $1 million to support 43 business startups led by women farmers. This is a result just in 2023. There’re many more examples to share across the board.
Since the reform and opening up in 1978, China has witnessed remarkable economic transformation, lifting nearly 770 million people, 50 percent of whom are women and girls, out of extreme poverty. While there is no one-size-fits-all growth and development model, we believe China’s experience provides a valuable lesson for other countries in accelerating progress towards ending poverty, including among women and girls.
More importantly, with China being a longstanding South-South cooperation partner and finance provider, we see enormous opportunities to strengthen cooperation and innovative partnerships in accelerating gender equality and women’s empowerment through the existing mechanisms. At UN Women, alongside with our UN family, we stand ready to work with China’s institutions and partners to inform development cooperation for enhanced Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) impact including for SDG5.
Tang Ying, director of the Global Development Promotion Center of CIDCA
Our goal is to set up a platform where we can communicate our conceptions, study ways of innovation, gather resources and take joint actions. To this end, we have set up eight tool kits. I’ll elaborate on two of them today – the project toolkit and the fund toolkit – and what they could do for women and girls. The project toolkit is composed of two sub-kits, one for achievements and the other for incubation. We use the kit of achievements to recommend our successful projects to help them gain more resources to grow and expand. We also apply their models to other projects. We are seeking more policy and resource support for projects in our incubation kit. We already have had more than 2,000 projects in this kit and are currently evaluating another 500, a fair number of which are dedicated to women’s health and employment and girls’ education. Once approved, they’ll get fund from governments and our partners.
For example, I talked with my colleagues in Egypt and the Palace Museum yesterday about a cultural exchange project, which aims to help local women in Egypt design, make and sell cultural and creative products. The Palace Museum will provide the intellectual resources and part of the fund. We’ll offer the other part of the fund. While helping gain local women greater access to jobs, we also get a chance to learn more about Egyptian culture from this project. So it’ll be a win-win scenario.
And what’s in our fund toolkit? We get fund from four sources: China’s government fiscal budget, the global development and South-South cooperation fund of CIDCA, and our cooperation with both domestic and international banks. We’ve signed an agreement with three banks on $12 billion, which is being exclusively used on our project toolkit. The last source is from our partners and companies.
Li Yingtao, professor of the School of International Relations and Diplomacy and director of the Center of Gender and Global Studies at Beijing Foreign Studies University
At a time when it’s difficult to launch international cooperation in hard power areas such as security, given increasing and heightened global conflicts coupled with challenging economic conditions, it seems extremely important that we collaborate on soft power projects, including women’s empowerment, poverty elimination, gender equality and sustainable development.
As for the future areas where we can possibly make efforts in achieving gender equality, I think we can focus on the green economy and the purple economy. The green economy, which is well-known to everyone, is related to environment and climate change. The purple economy (the name of which derives from the color used to represent the fight for gender equality) is actually more than the care economy it’s often referred to. For instance, we have a domestic service company called Ayilaile.com in Beijing, which was founded in 2007 to meet the soaring demand for caregivers in the capital city. Over the years, the center has sprawled to over 20 cities with 120 chains on top of its APP. It has cultivated 460,000 professional female caregivers who have served over 300,000 families. They don’t just get medical insurance, retirement pension and other social benefits by working there, they also have numerous opportunities to be promoted to leadership roles. It’s fair to say that while the company is expanding, they are growing, too. In this way, they have straddled the boundary of paid and unpaid work, as well as the boundary of formal and informal sectors. I think this case serves a very pertinent example in the international community.
What’s more, how we combine green and purple economies with digital economy is a new area worth doing research for. Meanwhile, women, though being an entirety, are quite different from one another. How we look at them, look at vulnerable groups, look at sustainable development, from this perspective, is crucial.
Zhu Weiqing, founder and CEO at Shanghai Treasure Carbon
Involving women in the carbon market is a rather new area. Globally there are plenty of carbon emission projects. However, such projects would enjoy more popularity once women or children are involved. For instance, the carbon pricing of most projects is between $5 and $7 per metric ton, but would rise to the range of $15 to $45 once they are designed to protect women or encourage women to participate in climate actions. From the signal of the carbon offset pricing, we can see that stakeholders on the carbon market are more than willing to invest in projects related to women and girls, especially to SDG5.
At Treasure Carbon, we’ve been investing in providing energy-efficient products such as fuel-efficient stoves and wearable LED lights across some African and Southeast Asian countries where women are still the dominant labor force at home. They do the cooking and make handicrafts. In particular, the installation of rooftop solar panels in poverty-stricken areas have not only benefited women in their health because of the reduced use of coal, but also created job opportunities for them, including in the realms of agriculture, land management, green architecture and city planning.
In fact, the transformation of the global economic and energy structures is providing women with numerous such opportunities. I’ve been communicating a lot with government departments and businesses recently, and can feel their urgency to finance women-related climate change projects.
