The Women 20 (W20) is the official G20 engagement group. It is holding its final summit here in Mamallapuram and will submit a communique on efforts by rural women to empower themselves and the community around them in the G20 countries.
From the communique the G20 summit is expected to pick up a few suggestions during its meeting in September and develop a policy to address the issues faced by women and take forward their development, said Sandhya Porecha, W20 Chair.
The W20 group was created in 2015 under Turkey’s presidency of the G20 with the objective of focusing on gender equity. The primary objective of W20 is women’s empowerment, advocating for women’s rights, and raising women’s voices in society.
It was founded on the idea that domestic initiatives needed to be incorporated into an international strategy to see any appreciable changes because progress towards gender equality had been too slow and peripheral.
Additionally, it aims to ensure that the G20 Leaders’ Declaration includes commitments and measures that support gender equality and women’s economic empowerment.
The W20 group has collected its observations about efforts by women across the participating countries. The W20 engagement held its first meeting in Aurangabad and the second in Jaipur.
Dharitri Patnaik, W20 coordinator, said the summit brought to the table learnings from its participants from various countries. Representatives from the G20 countries would also share their experiences with grassroots women’s empowerment movements in their respective countries at the three-day session that got underway on Wednesday.
At the janbhagidhari (public participation) session held later in the day, enterprising women spoke of how they developed themselves from being inconsequential even to their families to becoming a force to reckon with in their community.
Women from rural Telangana, Tamil Nadu, Uttar Pradesh, and Karnataka shared their life stories. Most of them were married in their teens and are from poor rural households. They had to work hard to get their family’s support.
