In early 2019, Equipop launched a campaign to put gender equality on the international political agenda, taking advantage of the opportunity presented by the G7 summit in France. A year and a half later, the foundations have been laid, and the work can now move towards advocating for feminist foreign policies.
In 2019, Equipop co-led an advocacy and communication campaign called "Women 7." The goal was to influence the G7, but above all to seize this opportunity to lay the foundations for broader action: to help put gender equality on the international political agenda and push France to make it a major focus of its foreign policy. On May 9, 2019, Equipop and its Women 7 partners brought together nearly 400 feminists from 20 countries in Paris and delivered recommendations to the seven ministers of the G7 states.
FIRST PROGRESS AT THE G7 IN BIARRITZ
At the Biarritz summit in late August 2019, all G7 countries and four guest countries adopted the Biarritz Partnership on Gender Equality, launched the AFAWA1 initiative for women's entrepreneurship in Africa, and, among other things, allocated funding to the fund created by Denis Mukwege and Nadia Murad to support survivors of sexual violence in times of conflict. These measures, taken in a context of very difficult negotiations due to the US position, represent a first step forward. However, the approach of defending gender equality as an end in itself and not as a means to serve the economy has not yet gained acceptance. This obviously requires strong advocacy over the long term.
On the other hand, significant progress has been made in terms of encouraging France to make gender equality a central element of its foreign policy. Since the G7, France has volunteered to co-organize the Generation Equality Forum (GEF) with Mexico and UN Women. This event, celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Beijing Platform for Action, the most important international reference on women's rights, will put France at the center of the map in 2021 (the event has been postponed for a year due to the Covid-19 pandemic).
FOR A "FEMINIST FOREIGN POLICY"
In 2019, France set itself the goal of promoting "feminist diplomacy." This political initiative is a step in the right direction; it is now up to the French government to define its contours more precisely and translate it into concrete action. To accelerate this movement, Equipop is contributing to the work of the HCE (High Council for Gender Equality) for the period 2019-2021. Numerous hearings with various institutions (Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Ministry of Finance, French Development Agency, etc.) have been conducted and have led to the following conclusions: the term "feminist foreign policy" is more relevant, and there is still a long way to go before a truly feminist, i.e., transformative, policy can be implemented.
In this context, Equipop has also worked to highlight the "SRHR" (sexual and reproductive health and rights) approach, without which there can be no real progress towards gender equality. Women 7 had insisted that France defend this issue within the G7, knowing that strong opposition from the United States would probably prevent it. However, once the G7 was over, this led to greater ownership of the issue by the French government. In order to consolidate this trend, Equipop encouraged French participation in the Nairobi summit celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Cairo International Conference on Population and Development, and in November 2019 took the initiative to bring together around 100 associations (from West Africa, France, and around the world) to ask Emmanuel Macron to ensure that SRHR was included on the FGE agenda. In early 2020, SRHR was a separate topic of one of the six "action coalitions" formed for the GFE. France will also be the lead country for this coalition.
TOWARDS THE GENERATION EQUALITY FORUM IN 2021
The FGE will take place in late spring 2021. Between now and then, Equipop will focus on driving two initiatives. The first will be to facilitate the participation of West African civil society organizations in international processes. This began with the G7 in 2019, and the FGE will provide an opportunity to scale up these efforts. Equipop will contribute to this through its various partnerships with women's and youth movements, organizations specializing in SRHR, and young feminist activists. In France, the coalition of associations that came together in 2019 under the banner Women 7 will continue its work in the context of the WEF. Equipop intends to contribute its expertise in institutional advocacy so that feminist associations, whether national or international, are recognized, heard, and supported, including financially, and that the FGE is a moment of political mobilization that will truly advance societies toward gender equality.
