When the United Nations General Assembly agreed the Sustainable Development Goals last September, it replaced a famously ambitious agenda – the Millennium Development Goals – with an agenda so far-reaching that critics immediately set about dismissing it as the stuff of fairytales. The 17 ‘Global Goals’, as they are better known, set out stretching development and environmental objectives for all countries everywhere over the next 15 years. By 2030 countries must ‘End poverty in all its forms everywhere’, ‘End hunger’ and the list continues, bringing ancient wicked problems (peace, inequality) together with modern ones (climate change, urbanisation) in a panoply of hugely ambitious scope.
We clearly have a huge task ahead of us to make these goals a reality, not least in the face of a historic migrant crisis, rising inequality across the globe, and developed countries giving up on multilateralism at just the time we need it most. The key to implementing the Global Goals will be to understand the connections between them, including the potential positive multipliers and constraints to progress. For these reasons there can be few better places to start than with women and girls.
This sentiment was echoed recently by the head of UN Women Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, who said ‘If you don’t know where to start with the SDGs, start with women and girls, and everything else will fall into place.’
Focusing on women and girls is not only important in and of itself. It is also smart because when we see progress for these groups, we tend to see progress in a variety of other development areas; secondary education for girls is one of the four most robust predictors of a country’s improved health outcomes, for example. Meanwhile, maternal education is associated with later marriage and pregnancy, fewer women dying in childbirth, increased use of health services and improved child health and nutrition. And, unlike many of the goals, a lot of progress can be made just by changing hearts, minds and social practices.
A new viral video cleverly reimagines the Spice Girls’ classic ‘Wannabe’ to highlight how far we still have to come in truly empowering young women globally, as part of the #WhatIReallyReallyWant campaign. Instead of wanting to ‘zigaziga’, girls in the video demand an end to child marriage and equal access to education. It is a fun way to focus on some devastating realities; Unicef estimates that some 720 million women alive today were married before they were 18, compared with 156 million men. In Afghanistan, 40 girls complete primary school for every 100 boys.
As with the positive multipliers, negative outcomes for women and girls tend to spill over into other areas, creating a pernicious nexus of related problems. Early marriage can end an education: for example, in Sierra Leone pregnant girls are not allowed to attend schools and take exams. Meanwhile sexual violence is a major cause of adolescent pregnancy. For example, in Peru, 60 per cent of pregnancies among girls aged 12–16 were due to sexual violence. And this very risk of sexual violence means parents often stop girls going to school.
We know from the experience of the Millennium Development Goals that big strides are possible; 91 per cent of girls worldwide completed primary school in 2013, up from 78 per cent in 2000 and nearing boys’ completion rate of 93 per cent. We should therefore be both optimistic and ambitious. But the scope of the new Global Goals requires addressing deeply rooted cultural, structural and societal barriers to gender equality. The empowerment of girls, Spice Girls-style – to lead change, inform interventions, and enforce rights – is necessary but not sufficient. Real change will also require sustained political focus, financial resources, international support and the involvement of all parts of society – crucially including men and boys. Only then will we build the world that we all really, really want.
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Claire Leigh is director of policy and research at Save the Children UK. She tweets at @ClaireLeighDev