The event will bring together a diverse group of women human rights activists, trade unionist and practitioners to discuss the role of public services in the transformation of uneven gender relations.

From efforts to reframe the economy embedding gender equality and human rights principles, advocating for tax justice, debunking the myths behind the commercialization of public services, strengthening workers’ rights in public service, pushing for the building of public care systems, and advancing human rights-based and bottom-up approaches to public services, the convening civil society organizations will seek to share their feminist visions on how public services can tackle the root causes of gender inequality.

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Friday 2nd July 2021 | 1.30-3.00 pm CEST | 7.30-9.00 am EDT
Interpretation in French and Spanish
Check your local time here.

Speakers :

• Rosa Pavanelli, General Secretary, Public Services International - PSI

• Corina Rodriguez, Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era - DAWN

• Kate Donald, Center for Economic and Social Rights - CESR

• Alejandra Lozano, The Global Initiative for Economic, Social and Cultural Rights - GI-ESCR

• Charity Mandishona, Zimbabwe Chamber of Informal Economy Associations ZCIEA-WomanKind

• Gloria Mills, PSI World Women's Committee Vice-Chair, UNISON, UK

• Grazielle David, Global Alliance for Tax Justice - GATJ

• Chenai Mukumba, Tax Justice Network - TJN- Africa

• Irene Khumalo, PSI World Women's Committee Chair, Swaziland Democratic Nurses' Union, Eswatini

Moderator

Neelanjana Mukhia, ActionAid

Background

For more than four decades, in most parts of the world the myth that the private sector can deliver more efficient and accessible services than those provided by the publicly delivered fostered the implementation of economic measures in which services traditionally owned and delivered by the State have increasingly passed into the private sector. This view has also supported austerity measures that have left public services without the capacity to respond to the COVID-19 crisis and fulfil the fundamental rights to education, health, care, social security, water and sanitation of the most marginalized and disadvantaged communities and right-holders across the world.

The compounded impacts of austerity, privatization and the COVID-19 crisis on public services have been catastrophic. COVID-19 has also brutally exposed the crisis of care and the States’ lack of willingness, resource allocations, and capacity to organise care as a public good. However, public services can play a decisive role in realizing women’s rights, and in the transformation of the asymmetrical and unjust power relations between persons of different genders. Public services enable us to tackle not only the consequences, but also the systemic and underlying factors—the uneven power imbalances — underpinning gender inequality.

How do we organise, manage, fund and deliver public services so as to enable them to achieve their transformative potential in achieving gender equality? How we redress the current unbalanced, unequal and unsustainable social organisation of care putting in the centre the fundamental role of States and public services in building a human right based approach to care? This event will convene a group of activists and experts from different areas of expertise whose research and advocacy work has made ground-breaking achievements using innovative and creative strategies to advance new alternative forms of organizing public services.

From efforts to reframe the economy embedding gender equality and human rights principles, advocating for tax justice, debunking the myths behind the commercialization of public services, strengthening workers’ rights in public service, pushing for the building of public care systems, and advancing human rights-based and bottom-up approaches to public services, the convening civil society organizations will seek to share their feminist visions on how public services can tackle the root causes of gender inequality.