More than a hundred parliamentarians from 19 countries and representatives of regional parliaments exchanged experiences and challenges of the Regional Gender Agendaduring the Parliamentary Forum held from November 7 to 8 in Buenos Aires, Argentina, within the framework of the Fifteenth Regional Conference on Women in Latin America and the Caribbean.
In the event, entitled “The care society: horizon for a sustainable recovery with gender equality”, the parliamentarians highlighted the key role of parliaments in advancing in the construction of the care society and emphasized the urgency of advancing towards equality of gender and the physical, economic and decision-making autonomy of women.
José Manuel Salazar-Xirinachs, Executive Secretary of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) and María Noel Vaeza, Regional Director of UN Women for the Americas and the Caribbean, participated in the closing of the meeting.
“The debates that we heard in this Parliamentary Forum predict a will for change and a more promising future,” said ECLAC’s Executive Secretary during his speech.
“As we have been maintaining at ECLAC, this is the time to think, design and implement transformative and bold policies that offer realistic solutions to economic, social and environmental inequalities and allow the structural knots of gender inequality to be untied,” he added.
José Manuel Salazar-Xirinachs highlighted that, in the last 45 years, at the Regional Conference on Women in Latin America and the Caribbean, governments have agreed on a profound, progressive and comprehensive Regional Gender Agenda, which positions the region as the only in the world to have a roadmap that guides the public policies of the countries to achieve gender equality in law and in fact, the guarantee of the rights and autonomy of women, and provides proposals to overcome the structural knots of inequality.
“This agenda is nourished by the capacity, strength and creativity of the women of Latin America and the Caribbean and the contributions of the women’s and feminist movements in the region and is closely articulated with the 2030 Agenda to set the course for continue for a sustainable development with gender equality”, he expressed.
The Executive Secretary of ECLAC stressed that improving the institutional capacity of States, optimizing the design, monitoring and evaluation of policies, is not only the responsibility of governments: Parliaments have a central role in advancing public policies that achieve structural changes and sustainable.
“We share the desire to continue building a future of sustainable development with equality and sustainability of life as central principles for the change in civilization and well-being that the region is seeking today,” concluded José Manuel Salazar-Xirinachs.
María Noel Vaeza, Regional Director of UN Women for the Americas and the Caribbean, for her part, stressed that gender equality must continue to be a priority at the global and regional levels, as established by the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.
He also highlighted the urgency of eradicating violence against women in politics, eliminating discrimination in access to fair wages, credit, economic opportunities, health and education, and care, and urged to continue forging alliances “so that this dream of gender equality in the region becomes a reality”.
On the first day of the Parliamentary Forum, on Monday, November 7, ECLAC and UN Women presented the joint document entitled Advances in care regulations in Latin America and the Caribbean: towards a care society with gender equalitywhich analyzes the progressive incorporation of care in the legal-regulatory frameworks of the countries of the region, in light of the commitments assumed by the Governments in the framework of the Regional Conference on Women in Latin America and the Caribbean, as part also of the commitments to carry out studies on the themes of the Gender Equality Observatory for Latin America and the Caribbean.
