Luxembourg and the Global Quest for Gender Equality

^{a few} Athina Vlachantoni. 2019. “Socio-economic inequalities in later life: the role of gender. ” Luxembourg’s experience is important here, getting played an important role within putting private finance in service of the environment. Its Luxembourg Green Exchange, created within 2016, is the world’s 1st platform dedicated to sustainable investments. By the end of 2021, the Exchange listed more than a 1000 “green, social, sustainability, plus sustainability-linked” bonds, worth a few 600 billion euros. ⁴ Brand new issuances are coming to the market at astonishing speed. Last year, they  topped one trillion dollars globally. Never before has so much money converged therefore fast towards a public good — like a stable climate. ¹ UNESCO. 2020. “Addressing the gender dimensions of COVID-related school closures. ” ^four Luxembourg Stock Exchange. (2022). A year in review : LGX. Retrieved July four, 2022, from https://www.bourse.lu/news-lgx-2021-a-year-in-review  Government responses to the outbreak were swift and significant—in the trillions of bucks. But those responses had been mostly gender blind. Out of more than 3, 000 interpersonal and labour-market measures used, only 12 per cent focused the needs of women. The result has become a slower and more costly recuperation for all. So the first session is this: put all open public policy through a gender zoom lens. When making decisions, have females in mind and in the room. The first step is to learn and apply the lessons through COVID-19, which particularly impacted women’s incomes, health and safety. Lockdowns and curfews significantly reduced their employment in the part-time, informal, service-oriented jobs where so many women relied. The pandemic interrupted gynecological plus reproductive care and increased all forms of gender-based violence. Some statistics are especially impressive indicators of the pandemic’s strong and long-term impact on lives and futures. Eleven million girls have dropped away from school and may never be able to return. That female human being capital will be lost permanently ¹ . Today, thirteen million less women are in employment. Whilst they lost their compensated jobs, women did a lot more unpaid work, as they became care providers for their home-bound children and their unwell elders. ² Those prolonged periods of reduced working hours or temporary career splits will soon show their particular impact in lower monthly pension wealth and higher incidence of female poverty within old age ³ . ² ILO. 2021. “Building Forward Fairer: Women’s rights to work and at work at the core of the COVID-19 recovery. ” The pandemic may have stalled women’s progress in the direction of equal rights, but it has additionally showed us the way forward. Critical in this progress may be the alignment of gender-sensitive plan and sustainable financing to achieve the SDGs. Governments and private investors can and should work together with each other in partnership in the direction of this goal. Only after that can we accelerate towards making gender equality a real possibility.   The 2nd, humbling lesson has been discovered in the past few years: governments are unable to fix the gender elegance problem on their own. Their funds, even when available, will not suffice. Nor will top-down reforms. We need to harness the power of markets. Solutions can only be found if we align the bonuses of governments and corporations, politicians and investors, community and private sectors. The success of green bonds can extend to gender bonds. Luxembourg is already the front-runner in advancing brand new financial instruments. It could become a front-runner in producing the financial ecosystem to advance gender equality, through the issuance of securities whose proceeds empower women and girls. A new group of standards with regard to gender investing that facilitates the use of sustainable debt intended for gender equality has recently been published by the International Capital Markets Association, the Worldwide Finance Corporation of the World Bank and UN Females. Less than one per cent of thematic bonds have sex as their theme5. All of that one particular per cent has been issued by corporates. No government offers ever issued a sex bond, even though many of them are actually active in the green space. Attaining gender equality is the right incentive to change that situation. Shared article by Franz Fayot, Minister for Development Assistance and Humanitarian Affairs and Sima Bahous, Executive Movie director of UN Women The Government of Luxembourg expects to seize this tactical moment. It has launched the threeyear partnership with EL Women to catalyse global capital markets, leverage public-private initiatives, and design new financial instruments. A similar collaboration with the Luxembourg Stock Exchange was agreed last May. The best aim is to bring quantity and quality to the financing of gender equality and also to mobilize capital flows that will meaningfully contribute to the Un Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and in particular SDG 5. Women and girls everywhere will benefit from it.

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