New Delhi: The logo and website of a global alliance for equal rights was launched in New Delhi Wednesday to encourage gender egalitarianism on a world scale.
The launch for the ‘Alliance for Global Good — Gender Equity and Equality’ was done by tech leader and philanthropist Bill Gates and Women and Child Development Minister Smriti Irani.
The alliance is anchored by the Confederation of Indian Industry’s (CII) Centre for Women Leadership with the World Economic Forum as a network partner and central non-profit Invest India as an institutional partner. It aims to achieve enhanced quality and access to health facilities, education and economic opportunities for women.
At a briefing Wednesday, the co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation said the initiative started with India’s very successful G20 summit, “which showed the world many of the great things going on, including this new focus on women-led development”.
“I am very pleased to see this coming together,” Bill Gates said, adding that many of these issues had not caught the attention they deserved till now.
“I think we can actually make rapid progress in a number of things and both I and my co-chair Melinda Gates are very committed to that. The focus of the Alliance is on issues of general health, education and enterprise, and all of them are very important to equitable development,” he said.
Earlier this year, the Alliance was launched at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos.
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Irani said that the initiative was a collective of different governments, industry and development organisations. “We had close to 500 foreign dignitaries at that (WEF) lounge hoping to take a leaf from the Indian lesson in equity and equality with the promise that they can replicate it in their own nation states or organisations,” she noted.
Irani said, with an alliance like this, India was hoping to bridge the gap between the Global North and the Global South.
She added that both the CII and FICCI have decided to provide instruments to compute and train professionals on gender budgeting, not only for India but also for the G20, B20 and W20.
“Gender budgeting has increased by 239 percent in the past 10 years under Prime Minister Narendra Modi,” she said, adding that since the government was trying to be a bridge, it should be built on equity and equality. “And what better to cement that bridge than gender.”
(Edited by Tikli Basu)
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