This week, governments will meet at the United Nations in New York for the Financing for Development Forum, and the challenge is very clear. Too little progress has been made towards achieving the UN’s sustainable development goals (SDGs), which to a large extent is the consequence of lacking finance. The 2015 Addis Ababa Action Agenda, a UN framework adopted at the same time as the SDGs, which is supposed to ensure money flows toward development and the achievement of the SDGs, is not fulfilling its objective.

While the IMF cautions against the fiscal risks of public-private partnerships (PPPs), the institution is simultaneously backing them at a country programme level and advocates austerity measures that push governments towards expanding PPPs through constrained budgets.

In a valuable step forward to support human rights compliant economic policy-making, the UN Human Rights Council (HRC) called on 21 March for governments and intergovernmental organisations to make use of new UN guidance when developing economic reforms.

Social protection has been at the forefront of discussions of late, with it playing a central role in the Sustainable Development Goals, featuring heavily at this year’s United Nations Commission on the Status of Women, and as the International Monetary Fund developing an institutional view on social protection. 

Over the course of the week leading up to International Women's Day 2019 we released a series of graphics featuring the staff of Eurodad and their work areas, with quotes reflecting how Eurodad's work aims to promote gender equality. 

Today, March 8th, marks International Women’s Day and the launch of the Global Days of Action on Tax Justice for Women’s Rights, coordinated by the Global Alliance for Tax Justice. News headlines will rightly focus on the oppression, discrimination and systemic inequalities faced by women, but one point that is often overlooked is the many ways in which the tax system, like other policies and structures, offers a transformative tool for redistribution and financing gender equity.

Public-private partnerships (PPPs) are being actively promoted by donor governments and international financial institutions to finance social services and infrastructure projects around the world.. PPPs are agreements where private sector companies replace the state as providers of traditional public services and infrastructure, such as health and education, transport, energy, and water and sanitation.

A central part of today’s unjust economic system is the disadvantageous position of women compared to men. Women are more likely to live in poverty, and are more strongly impacted by increasing global economic inequality. The difference between men and women in access to decent jobs and equal pay, as well as numerous examples of discrimination regarding ownership and inheritance rules are just some of the factors that maintain and reinforce these inequalities. Severe under-representation of women and girls in economic and wider societal decision-making at all levels adds further to the structural inequalities.

This week the UN Human Rights Council will discuss new Guiding Principles to ensure human rights are integral to economic policy-making.