CALLING ON GLOBAL PARTNERS AT THE GENERATION EQUALITY FORUM IN PARIS JUNE 28TH-JULY 2ND.
Hello AMPLIFY Community - we are seeking signatures to sign onto our letter in partnership with the Coalition for Adolescent Girls. Please sign your name below if you would like your name added to the list! OR you can email us at info@amplifygirls.org and let us know that you would like to be included by June 22nd 2021.
Dear Generation Equality Commitment Makers,
Adolescent girls must be front and center in the global movement for gender equality. As organizations committed to ensuring adolescent girls around the world are able to grow up healthy, educated, employable, and protected from all forms of violence, we write to urge you to publicly demonstrate your commitment to adolescent girls by placing them front and center in the Generation Equality Process, particularly in the five-year period following the Generation Equality Forum in Paris (June 30 – July 2, 2021).
Adolescent girls are perhaps our most capable advocates for equality and inclusion if Malala Yousafzai and Greta Thunberg are any indication of the millions of adolescent girls whose voices we have yet to hear and whose solutions to the globe’s most pressing challenges we have yet to consider. Further, community-based organizations are the best placed to strengthen adolescent girl-led and girl-focused networks at local, national, and regional levels. Therefore, adolescent girls and the community-based organizations that underpin their efforts should be engaged more meaningfully in Generation Equality discussions, accountability processes, and activities.
As Generation Equality Commitment Makers, you can ensure through the announcement of the commitments you are making that the participation, agency and voice of adolescent girls is maintained throughout the five-year action period following the Paris Forum:
i) by supporting initiatives that directly address the specific barriers that adolescent girls face not only to programs that build girls’ skills to enable their leadership and participation but also to opportunities like Generation Equality where they can engage in global change processes;
ii) by prioritizing sustained partnerships with girl-led and girl-serving community-based organizations, as essential allies and vital resource supports to mentor and motivate adolescent girls to become critical thought-leaders, implementing partners, and decision-makers in equality, equity, and inclusion efforts; and
iii) by advocating for greater representation of adolescent girl-led and girl-focused community-based organizations and networks from the Global South in formal Generation Equality accountability processes.
In light of this, we ask that bottom-up funding be prioritized to finance and resource local capacity, collaboration and learning, relevant mentorship and coaching models, and the promotion of scalable solutions that place equality at the core of health and wellbeing, education, skills training, economic justice, protection and workforce development innovations. This is critical to ensure that even the most excluded girls are part of Generation Equality efforts, particularly those in conflict and crisis-affected contexts, or remote rural areas of the Global South. Such commitments will strengthen the relevance and effectiveness of future reporting processes, accountability frameworks and other mechanisms meant to measure progress toward improving the lives of adolescent girls globally.
Decades of evidence show investment in girls has yielded significant gains in adolescent girls’ health and education outcomes, as well as contributed to ending intergenerational household level poverty. We stand with adolescent girls and their need to be consulted and recognized as their own thought leaders with a critical stake in addressing inequality, inequity and exclusion on their journey to a brighter future.
Signed,