The MDG3 in the Language of Beijing

The MDG3 in the Language of Beijing: A Blog Series
by Lalaine P. Viado

The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are not stand alone goals that sprung up with the new millennium. Particularly MDG3: Gender Equality, this goal is but a chip off the block from the Beijing Platform for Action (BPA) and the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). The BPA was the result of the Fourth World Conference on Women in 1995 with the strong global backdrop and recognition that women’s rights are human rights in 1993 at the World Conference on Human Rights (Vienna Conference). CEDAW, on the other hand, is much older and a treaty binding document signed by 130 countries as early as 1979 and came into force, the fastest among all UN instruments, in 1981. The CEDAW, otherwise known as the international bill of rights for women, was brought to bear by an earlier Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women drafted in 1965 and adopted in 1967.

The UN community was not as “un-savvy” as we may think now as it was in the sixties on to the nineties, in light of penning international agreements, and a treaty at that, in promoting women’s rights and combating violence against women.

In concert with the ever-growing women’s activism of the nineties, APC WNSP’s work was also gaining momentum at the decade’s threshold. It eventually found its solid standing in the work for women’s rights and actively participated in the 1995 Beijing Conference before, during and beyond the drafting of the BPA. With primary focus on women’s access and control of Information Communication Technologies (ICTs), as it uses, questions and transforms these technologies, to combat violence against women and uphold women’s rights online and offline, APC WNSP was able to link with the various geo-political locations of the global women’s movement, as it connects them, between and among themselves, via its support for networking. Since the nineties, APC WNSP has identified with the even larger social movements that characterise APC membership.

Indeed, there is a bigger horizon of women’s rights advocacy, from the international community as embodied in treaties and agreements, as inscribed in histories of women’s and social movements, and in the beginnings of the APC WNSP. The work on violence against women and women’s rights have begun long ago before MDGs were conceived. And even when present energies driving women’s activism now may be interpreted, minutely, in the present era and context of the MDGs, the MDG3 in particular is but a continuation of the work, of APC’s work in particular, and such continuing work shall still render itself true to the spirit of the BPA and the CEDAW, as it did before.

Yet, at the turn of the century, when the impressive era of the UN in the “sixty nines” (sixties and the nineties) have packed up and the 20th century said goodbye, one document was suddenly tightening us all up in such a sweet, unilateral embrace of the MDGs. Suddenly, all talk of the new millennium is a talk of the millennium development goals.

The MDG3 is in fact less of being the chip off the block of the BPA and CEDAW. It will not and cannot replace BPA and CEDAW, though it can enhance implementation and compliance of both. Gender equality is but a component, a requisite of women’s empowerment and the elimination of women’s discrimination. The BPA and CEDAW lend themselves as the overarching framework with which MDG3 will be able to function with comparable success. No talk of MDGs is ever complete without in mind the BPA and CEDAW, and the history of the struggles for women’s rights and empowerment that were carried through in the hearts, bodies, and spirits of the sixties to the nineties.

Then again, the MDG3 is perhaps exactly that – a chip off the bigger block: a shard of the bigger part, a shrapnel of an unfinished piece, a member of the whole, a leaf of a tree. Smaller pieces, like any of them, help achieve the bigger picture.

The MDGs sometimes are accused of diluting the more holistic and comprehensive frameworks of Beijing and CEDAW. That’s fine. Unless it interprets gender equality as a requisite for women’s empowerment, it cannot drastically depart from the two. To question the MDG from a critical point of view is the same exercise at which we may look at the BPA and the CEDAW critically: how are they meeting the goals, how has implementation progressed, and how much of the treaty still remains on paper?

In fact, the same critical viewpoints can be said for all. What of it comes significantly to women on the ground in such a top-down international strategy? How much have they deflected from the real intent of respecting, promoting and upholding women’s rights? When did they all become one humongous bureaucracy and a lip-synching international exercise of diplomacy, extending to the far too wide national commitments in disguise? When 2015 comes, what happens to the BPA as a 20 year-old document? And what if the MDG shall see itself as it remains today, as just not goals, but goals for another millennium?

(Note: A first of three blogs/writings to come related to the topic. The next one to follow in two weeks after this posting. Author will be attending Beijing+15 review in Bangkok next week and will be having lots of sticky rice mangoes in the meantime.)