Buenos Aires Declaration on Women and Trade will provide key guidance for parliaments to deliver on the financial inclusion of women
Women’s economic empowerment and their access to trade will be the subject of the Buenos Aires Declaration on Women and Trade at the 11th Ministerial Conference of the World Trade Organization (WTO), taking place in Buenos Aires from 10 to 13 December. The Declaration—an initiative of the Trade Impact Group of the International Gender Champions, chaired by the International Trade Centre (ITC), Sierra Leone and Iceland—was presented to the IPU’s Parliamentary Conference on the WTO on 10 December.
As a Gender Champion, Martin Chungong, Secretary General of the IPU, fully supports the Declaration. “Women's financial inclusion is a key driver of development,” he said. “It makes communities resilient and leads to improvements in child health and education. For that we need trade policies to be gender-responsive.”
Encouraging women’s full participation in trade is an important part of the IPU’s agenda. In April 2017, the 136th IPU Assembly adopted a resolution on the financial inclusion of women as a driver of development. The resolution calls on parliaments to put in place measures to encourage the inclusion of women in the economy through legislation, policy objectives, education and training, and financial products designed specifically for them.
The Declaration on Women and Trade will also allow parliaments to take concrete follow-up action to the resolution. It will help parliaments ensure that their governments deliver on women’s financial inclusion. The outcome document from the Parliamentary Conference also touches upon this issue, calling for policymakers to “integrate the gender perspective into macroeconomic policies”.
Picture copyright: Argentinian Congress