A call to action on the Pact for the Future
This article was written by Anya Gass, Policy & Advocacy Lead on Meaningful Youth Engagement at Plan International. For more information on Plan’s work, please reach out to [email protected].
Last month, the world gathered at the UN in New York for the Summit of the Future. This conference was an opportunity to rally the global community in a commitment to accelerate progress toward the Sustainable Development Goals and make sure the international system is fit-for-purpose for the future.
For us at Plan International, this was an important space to raise the profile of girls’ rights and center youth voices. In our work with Member States and other key stakeholders, we aimed to secure recognition of, commitment to and investment in adolescent girls’ rights in the Summit of the Future and its outcome documents (Pact for the Future, Declaration on Future Generations and the Global Digital Compact). Specifically, we advocated to:
Protect against the backsliding of girls’ rights and gender equality: From sexual and reproductive health and rights to girls’ participation in decision-making, hard won gains we have made for girls and young women are being questioned. It is critical that allies of girls’ rights continue to push for those rights to not only be protected but advanced.
Support meaningful youth influencing and engagement: Young people are too often left out of critical decision-making spaces at all levels, and at best, they are involved in a tokenistic manner. Plan International advocates to make sure that they can meaningfully engage and that they are part of policymaking from the beginning.
In support of this second objective, Plan worked with a group of 35 young people from 22 countries in the months leading up to the Summit to advocate jointly to ensure that their priorities were reflected in the Summit. One of the key outputs of the Youth Task Force for the Future was the Girls’ Pact for the Future, a youth-led manifesto outlining adolescent girls’ and young people’s vision for a gender-equal future, and putting forward their recommendations to reach that future.
The Girls’ Pact for the Future led to the identification of the Eight Transformative Actions for Adolescent Girls and Young People, the top actions from the Girls’ Pact for the Future that young people believed would be most impactful in propelling us toward the future they envision.
Given this backdrop of rights under threat, how does the UN’s Pact for the Future measure up? Is this the framework that will deliver the change adolescent girls and young people are calling for?
Here are some of the areas where the Pact for the Future and its two annexes were strong:
— Girls’ rights: Gender equality is at the heart of the Pact of the Future, which highlights the importance of the empowerment of all women and girls for the achievement of sustainable development. Adolescent girls are also explicitly mentioned in the text. In addition, all three texts emphasize the need to address sexual and gender-based violence, a critical barrier for the fulfilment of girls’ rights.
— Youth participation: Youth features prominently in the Pact, the Declaration on Future Generations and the Global Digital Compact. Two of the actions in the Pact are dedicated to the full, meaningful and effective participation of youth in decision-making at both the national and international levels.
— Inclusion and non-discrimination: The Pact recognizes the specific discrimination and vulnerabilities faced by certain groups, including persons with disabilities and those facing racism, xenophobia and other forms of discrimination.
Where does the Pact fall short?
But there were also numerous challenges and areas where the Pact could have been much stronger:
— Education: The Pact falls short of setting out concrete actions to increase global investment in inclusive quality education as the foundation for advancing gender equality and a more sustainable and peaceful future.
— Sexual and reproductive health and rights: We welcome references to the Program of Action of the International Conference of Population and Development and the Beijing Platform for Action, which remain critical frameworks for advancing SRHR and rights for girls. However, we regret that the Declaration on Future Generations missed an opportunity to include an express reference to SRHR.
What comes next is all the more critical: implementation. The UN and its Member States are at no loss for commitments. But what is missing is concrete action, investment and accountability.
We call on governments to work together with adolescent girls and young people to find creative and radical ways of implementing the Pact and particularly the Eight Transformative Actions. We urge all stakeholders to build on these actions in the run-up to COP29, the 30th anniversary of the Beijing Conference and numerous other global policy forums taking place in the next year.
For more articles of this nature, sign-up to receive our From Plan to Action, a quarterly newsletter that highlights the technical work of Plan International USA.