When Women Lead, Great Shifts Happen - Susan Jane Ferguson, UN Women

SheThePeople is dedicated to showcasing remarkable women from the global south. In a groundbreaking talk, Susan Jane Ferguson, the Country Representative at UN Women India Ambassadors, joins Shaili Chopra, the founder of SheThePeople and Gytree. Together, they discuss the vital role of women in the global south. This exclusive conversation covers areas like the path to gender equality, creative solutions, and the influence of India's leadership in the G20. It also highlights the obstacles, achievements, and powerful impact of digital technology in promoting gender equality.

UN Women's Role in India

Shaili Chopra: India is a country that has diversity at many levels outside of gender, which sometimes can make the task harder but also many times helps in solving a bunch of things together. So, talk to us about the work UN Women is doing in that direction. 

Susan Jane Ferguson: India, with the size of the population, if things work in India, then they're already at scale, and I think the world can learn from that. So, in UN Women, we really try and back what the government's doing for a start because we cannot reach scale. We're a tiny drop in the bucket in the context of India and also because India's got so many gender commitments, it is easy to come behind and provide technical support and assistance. So in the G20, we were working with the government to help engender all of the working groups and engagement groups.

In rural areas, we work on a program called Second Chance Education, which helps girls and women get back into school if they've had to drop out for different reasons while also increasing their technical skills in running a viable business. That includes digital training because it's so important that women are a part of this kind of fourth industrial revolution. 

Innovations and Progress in the Global South

Shaili Chopra:  There's always been this perception that organizations and those who work in the global south must look west to learn. And somehow, based on gender, including our work at SheThePeople and Gytree, we feel that we seem to be taking a much bigger leap ahead than many of the Western, or rather, more established, developed countries. Why do you think that is beginning to dawn upon us as a realization?

Susan Jane Ferguson: I agree with you that a lot of the innovations in the world are coming and will continue to come from the large countries in the Global South.  And if you look at, for instance, mobile phones in Africa, people sort of adopted mobile phones, sort of the use of mobile phones as normal, long before many Western countries did, including my own in Australia. I went from Australia in the early 2000s to work in South Africa, and I used mobile phones all the time because, because people didn't have landlines, they were able to just jump over this extraordinarily expensive infrastructure in building telephone lines and things like that; they didn't need them.

They just moved straight into the mobile world. And I think that's evidence here in India as well. You have these incredible payment systems and things like that that a lot of other countries in the West are trying to sort of put into place and get their legal architecture to kind of manage in a way. So I do think that these innovations are going to come from the global south more and more, especially in a country like India, which has an amazing education system. Some of the brightest minds in the world are here and are experimenting, and diversity adds to that because, if you look at businesses, there's so much evidence now that says that diversity in a company leads to more income, better profits, and innovation.

Role of Technology in Achieving Gender Equality

Shaili Chopra: You talk about a leap of technology as an example of Africa or India, for that matter. How do you think this leap can help us take the big leap in gender equality, and how do you feel technology could support this struggle and hope that we have for gender equality?

Susan Jane Ferguson:  I think technology is a big part of it. I think to achieve any of the SDGs, we're going to need to use technology to mitigate the impact of climate change or educate people and help them have access to services. So again, I think the digital world offers a way of reaching many millions of people with much less funding. A really good example of how technology can be used to do that is one of the things that was launched in the G20 through G20 Empower, which was a platform called Tech Equity. It's a platform where any organization or country can put digital training in many different languages that could be used by women in rural areas to use technology to scale up their businesses.

Digital skilling and education really can cut down on a lot of the problems that women have in accessing places in universities and schools, including safety. It means that women don't have to subject themselves to long-distance travel, which in some countries does bring about safety concerns, though the online environment brings different levels of safety concerns.

Using Technology to Address Financial Independence and Health

Shaili Chopra: There are specific issues that have always been the big barrier, other than safety, financial independence, and health. So when you look at these two, where do you think that we could use technology to push for this? 

Susan Jane Ferguson: I know that there's a big push here and in other countries also on looking at the skilling of doctors and nurses through digital technology, but also increasing women's access to services through telemedicine, which I really think got a big push because of COVID. We weren't able to access healthcare apart from the online sort of environment. So I think there's a lot that can be done on that. And in fact, my colleague here at UNFPA was telling me the other day that they're now looking at AI training. So I think that it's, the advances are enormous, and there is a lot of potential that we can't even imagine sitting here, I think, that are already happening.

Technology as an Enabler for Gender Equality

Shaili Chopra: Let's reflect a little bit on the power of digital and its ability to make women stand up for themselves.  Technology can be gender-agnostic, at least at the starting level. How do you think the response has been to some of the conversations you and women have tried to drive on technology being an enabler for women and their skills?

Susan Jane Ferguson:  I think most people realize that technology is an enabler. This year at the Commission on the Status of Women, it was all about the digital world and the digital economy and how women can benefit from that and member states who participate in that, which is huge; it's the biggest forum that the UN has every year, made a series of agreements on using digital technology to improve women's made a series of agreements on using digital technology to improve women's empowerment.

Women's Reservation Bill in India

Shaili Chopra: India is pushing its entire effort toward gender equality; I think one of the most pathbreaking bills has been the Women's Reservation Bill. It united every woman through every quarter of the political sphere, and women otherwise. What are your thoughts on this move? 

Susan Jane Ferguson: I'm not Indian, obviously, but I was excited by it. I was just blown away by how India, from one breath to the next, could bring in this bill that will bring in so many more women into Parliament, and I think the whole world is interested. 

It could have taken another generation for there to be 33% women in Parliament. But with the stroke of a pen, that's changed instantly. So I think it's an essential way to bring more women into Parliament because we can't wait for another generation. The 2030 agenda is delayed. It was set back badly by COVID. We know that we need to reach STG5, which is gender equality, there's a funding shortfall of $360 billion per year. It is urgent that we have parliaments that have a much clearer idea about what is going to make a difference for women and girls. 

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Enhancing Cohesion for Global Progress

Shaili Chopra: If there's political willpower to improve the state of women in various countries, then here's an opportunity for the global south to unite. Where do you think more work can be done for that to take place more cohesively?

Susan Jane Ferguson: Our Secretary-General has been to India a couple of times recently, and I think, with the view that India is a leader in the Global South, he wants India to bring together some other countries that may be lagging for good reason to speed ahead in the SDGs.  India has a very important role in the rest of the world, actually, and on the world stage, in bringing together these coalitions. 

Navigating Challenges in Gender Advocacy

Shaili Chopra: The G20 showcased an aggressive gender track that didn't get overshadowed. Turning to your personal journey, at what points have you found it hard to deal with driving the gender agenda?

Susan Jane Ferguson: It's been a delight working with UN Women because the mandate is all about women's empowerment. I don't have to make an argument for it. I can spend my limited time trying to get some change to happen rather than arguing within my organization.  In every other place I've ever worked, it's been a struggle, you know, because a lot of the people in power were men who did not have an interest in this.  It's a development process, isn't it? and it's one of the SDGs because it's essential for all of us, yet still, we have to argue the case.

Interconnected Nature of Women's Issues

Shaili Chopra:  My final question to you is that, to the point that you still have to argue the case, Why are women's issues not just women's issues?

Susan Jane Ferguson: We share a world; men and women share the same globe, and what one group with more power may do can impact the other group that has less power.  Women make up 50% of the world's population, and if we cannot reach our full potential, it holds everyone back. It holds women and everyone back. We're intimately connected in every aspect of our lives and these are shared issues that can only be solved through women and men making these changes in our own lives. 

The G20 Empowerment Journey

Shaili Chopra:  Reflecting on India's leadership in the G20, The idea of how we are looking at gender, most importantly with such a large population—I mean, women in India are the size of many countries. Talk to us about what you feel about the G20 track here.

Susan Jane Ferguson: Firstly, India was amazing in the G20, and really the leadership of India in focusing on women-led development for the first time ever in the G20 and probably the G7.  India did an extraordinarily good job, and I think that's reflected in the Delhi Declaration, where gender equality and women's empowerment are woven throughout that document.