In July 2022, after the successful conclusion of the Women20 Summit (W20) hosted by Indonesia at Lake Toba, BRICS Feminist Watch (BFW) sat down with Dwi Faiz, Head of Programmes at the UN Women Indonesia, to talk about her reflections on the W20, and its impact on women’s rights and also to share lessons learnt and her advice for India hosting the G20 Summit for 2023. This blog has been developed from the interview.
What role did you and UN Women Indonesia play in W20 Indonesia 2022?
UN Women Indonesia played a key support role to the Coordinating Committee of W20 Indonesia. This including advising the Committee on thematic areas, how to develop good communique. We also provided background research on previous W20. The research help capture key concerns and reflections and help develop a baseline on gender issues for Indonesia to build its W20 focus on. UN Women provided framework and a work plan to support Indonesian women leaders to lead the process. The thematic issues for W20 were developed as early as September or October in 2021. UN Women was not involved in this process. This was mainly done by the Chair and Co-chair of W20 Indonesia and the Sherpa. Background research of previous process was done by UN Women to develop clear rational around each proposed priority issue. UN Women also helped with inception note, desk review.
What do you feel the achievements of W20 Indonesia 2022. What are your Ah ha moments?
- Although we come from different countries and different realities, we were able to build consensus and develop one communique as an outcome document from W20 Indonesia 2022. Truly covering a diverse range of issues that impact women all around the world. This is a remarkable achievement. The commitment that the W20 Committee has made to work collaboratively in developing the communique is remarkable.
- With G20 focusing mainly around economic issue, W20 Indonesia is able to put forward not only the issue of women’s labour force participation and entrepreneurship, but also conversations around women’s sexual and reproductive health and rights and women’s unpaid work including care, domestic work and also unpaid work women do in agriculture.
- The W20 space provided a learning, sharing experience around gendered issues that has affected many delegates in so many different ways. . I can confidently say that the discussion process itself has helped the process to understand each country/economy context.
What were the challenges faced in hosting, coordinating such a big global event?
- The G20, formed in 1999, was conceived as a bloc that would bring together most important industrialised and emerging economies together to discuss international economic financial stability for the world. W20 tries to break the mould and work beyond economic issues, this is a challenge in itself, since these issues may not sit well with the overall focus on the economic side.
- To work collaboratively is also a challenge as the delegates coming from diverse background, mostly women leaders in business and academicians, the facilitating role of W20 Committee is put to the test, and this has been done remarkably well.
- Amidst the criticism that W20 has as an elite space, detached from the everyday reality of women living in G20 countries, yet we can see from the choice of issues that W20 has put forward, such as women and girls living in rural areas, as well concrete actions for ending discrimination and violence, this criticism may not be true and there is a strong direction towards inclusive process.
- Commitment from delegates to overcome different opinions is also commendable, I have seen the process where the delegates were able to come up with common understanding about intersectionality, hence the notion of “women and girls in their diversity” has become the glue. Again, to build consensus is a tall order, and achieved through the hardwork of the W20 Indonesia Committee, and commitment of all delegates to influence the G20 process.
- W20 doesn’t have a fixed secretariat or structure such as the Business 20 which has the Chamber of Commerce. It also doesn’t sit with any particularly ministry at national level. Hence knowledge management from previous processes is a challenge. For example, in Indonesia, excepting for one delegate, no one had attended any previous W20 Summits. Lack of continuity is a challenge, hence the idea from delegates to establish a knowledge hub is important.
What are the lessons learnt and what advice do you have for India planning for 2023?
- W20 brings delegates from various backgrounds and understanding on women’s issues, the diversity should stay with additional/support for expertise in the subject matter. Representing the interest from various groups should remain the strength of the engagement group.
- Secondly in order for W20 to be more effective and influential we need to build a movement within W20. We all have differences but we also have many commonalities. To build commonalities around common issues is easy but the real challenge is how to build a women’s movement around W20.
- It is important to note the good practices that Australia has in terms of its delegation. They have a group of women leaders (5-6) from diverse background that form W20 Australia delegation. They have a limited term of three years and they rotate membership to allow new members with new ideas and expertise to come in and previous members to leave after their term is over. It is important W20 has rotational leadership.
- For India the recommendation would be to develop white papers on all proposed thematic issues. And identify multiple experts across the country and to have consultations at country level and then to reach out to delegates from other countries to build consensus.
- In the short period of time, building the movement with W20 as engagement group needs to happen before the handover from Indonesia. Learning from our process the discussion with Sherpa and the relevant stakeholders needs to happen soon.
- While the inclusive and more diverse composition of delegates still a challenge, knowing the commitment of the delegates to advocate the issue that belongs to women in the global south, movement building in W20 is possible, and doable.
- BFW proposal on thematic areas for next year W20 are good ones and will surely help bring focus to global South women’s issues. These include:
- Women and Renewal Energy
- Women and Infrastructure
- Women and Natural Resource Management
- Women and Digital Economy
The blog was developed by Brianna Delahunty, with support from Luwam Amanuel. Both Bri and Luwam are Interns with BRICS Feminist Watch. We are grateful to Dwi Faiz for sharing her views with us.
