Guest of Honour and plenary speaker: Ban Ki-moon, Former Secretary-General of the UN
GS19 has a global mission: to significantly advance gender research for the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) during the remaining 10 year period of the UN Sustainable Development Agenda. The motivation for taking this action is that new gender research, more widely applied across all 17 SDGs, will ensure that the planned interventions will produce equal quality of outcomes for women and men, and help protect the wellbeing of natural environment and of ecosystems.
To achieve this mission, GS19 will involve major stakeholders in SDG research and interventions, including the 7000 strong Gender Summit Community, the 1400 institutions that are members of SDSN, as well as national and international research funders and publishers. The GS19 will start the discussion and the process to define a roadmap for action with priority (and feasible) research topics, especially those with cross-cutting impact for clusters of SDG targets. The roadmap will specify short term, medium term, and long term goals and opportunities. By “short-term” we mean that there are already funding programmes/agendas that could be readily adapted to incorporate gender perspectives into expected projects; “medium” means institutions may be already planning new programmes and could include a gender dimension when defining the programme’s scope; and “long term” means that fresh funding mechanism will have to be created first.
As an example of the output envisaged from GS19, please check the Roadmap for Action for North America, which was produced by the 3rd Gender Summit led by the NSF, in collaboration with various government agencies in the USA, Canada and Mexico.