What Is GSWF?

Background to Global South Women’s Forum

Despite lofty ambitions, the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development does not have a built-in compliance framework to ensure accountability to the prescribed goals. In order to ensure that gender equality is prioritised and localised, IWRAW Asia Pacific believes that meaningful, reciprocal communication channels must be forged to facilitate vital exchange between local and global levels on current information on the progress on gender equality worldwide. We committed to creating a platform that is both living and growing; that is organic, dynamic and symbiotic with other existing processes. This is how the Global South Women’s Forum (GSWF) on Sustainable Development, a forum that links local experiences to global processes, came to be: IWRAW Asia Pacific began to mobilise Global South WROs around the 2030 Agenda. The first GSWF was held in Cambodia in 2016, the second in Rwanda in 2017, the third in Jordan in 2018 and the fourth in Malaysia in 2019. The Forums brought together women from different parts of the Global South who addressed the conceptualisation of sustainable development as a women’s rights issue and strategised to work collectively.

We invite you to browse the resources that emerged from these events and to explore our CEDAW-SDGs toolkit, which identifies practical ways of linking the international women’s human rights and sustainable development frameworks. See Leave No One Behind: The Imperative of Inclusive Development in Palestine for an example of a report developed with the use of this tool.