IGTN believes that women have an integral role in ensuring and upholding the fundamental components of sustainable development: environmental protection, economic well-being, and social equity.
Women are the nucleus of the care economy and primarily responsible for nurturing, using, and maintaining the natural environment, providing food, shelter, healthcare, and maintaining social relations and community life. Since much of this socially sustainable work is unpaid, however, it is often un-counted in the market and in assessments of economic productivity.
The international trading system fails to acknowledge women's central role in enabling and securing socially sustainable devleopment and livelihoods worldwide. Trade negotiators also ignore that women and men do not have the same access to economic and social resources and will therefore be impacted differently.
IGTN calls for gender and social impact assessments of trade policies in order to better understand the gender impact of trade policies as well as their impact on socially sustainable development. These assessments must be undertaken if we are to make trade work for-rather than against- sustainable development.
The following featured resources highlight IGTN work on trade policy and sustainable development:
Additional resources are available online in the IGTN Resource Library.
