Southern Voice recently gathered in New York with global colleagues for the United Nations’ Summit of the Future, which took place on September 22-23. The UN Secretary-General had set out plans for a Summit of the Future in his 2021 “Our Common Agenda Report,” responding to a multilateral system failing to address existing and emerging global challenges: the COVID-19 pandemic, climate change, conflicts, among others. Various tracks were put forward, kickstarting an engagement process that brought us, a few weeks ago, to the Summit and to the adoption of the Pact for the Future. We take this opportunity to revisit some of the steps in this journey.

Southern Voice began to engage with the lead-up to the Summit of the Future in the context of the Global Digital Compact (GDC) drafting process. At the time, the world was slowly emerging from the pandemic. 

We had just published new findings highlighting the difficulties women and girls faced during the pandemic to access government services, such as education or business support, as movement restrictions precipitated a broad-scope reliance on digital technologies. 

We engaged experts across our network to understand, across contexts, the basic commitments to ensure that the GDC supported accelerated progress towards a free, equal and safe digital future for all women and girls. This would involve, beyond significant infrastructural investments to bridge the digital divide and measures to enable affordable internet access, a significant emphasis on the particular barriers that lead to the “gender digital divide”. 

We first discussed these recommendations with various stakeholders in a forum held in 2023, during the 67th Session of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW67). After refining them based on the feedback received, we then shared them in a joint written input, as part of a process led by the Office of the Secretary-General’s Envoy on Technology. 

Later in the process, we were able to emphasise some of the remaining gaps in the Zero Draft, during a session led by the GDC co-facilitators at the 2024 UN Civil Society Conference in Nairobi. The conference also gave rise to several ImPACT Coalitions, convening diverse stakeholders around key issues such as civil society participation in UN processes, or financing for development. 

Another focus area for Southern Voice, in the lead up to the Summit of the Future, was the topic of care. Here too, we built upon research conducted during the 2020 pandemic, which had shone a harsh light on the extent of the responsibilities, under the umbrella of “care”, that befall to households in times of crisis. This work had identified care as a key element of a new social contract. Through various steps in this process, we called for stronger care systems to be further centered in multilateral agendas – including, but not limited to, gender-focused spaces. 

Maintaining a strong level of engagement with relevant constituencies, through the spaces in which the follow-up on these commitments take place, will be key. In the coming months, Southern Voice will  engage with some of these spaces, including the next Internet Governance Forum in December 2024, the annual session of the CSW in March 2025, and the 4th International Financing for Development Conference in June-July 2025. We look forward to working with partners to strengthen the presence of Southern priorities at the heart of these and other debates.

RELATED POSTS