ABSTRACT
The September 2015 adoption of the United Nation’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)—with gender equality as a central stand-alone goal in addition to being a crosscutting goal—reflected a new development paradigm. Despite having a remarkable growth story and success in achieving many of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), South Asia continues to account for 36 per cent of the world’s poor, nearly half of its malnourished children, and significant gender inequalities in economic, health, and political opportunities and outcomes. While the subregion experienced the fastest Human Development Index (HDI) growth among developing regions with a 45.3 per cent increase since 1990, it also has the widest gap between men and women in HDI at 16.3 per cent. Given its share in the global population and poverty, South Asia is critical to determining the overall success of the SDGs. In this context, this chapter aims to analyse the key challenges in achieving Goal 5 and the accompanying nine targets—whose impact, if achieved, facilitates the achievement of many of the remaining 16 SDGs in South Asia. In turn, the achievement of this goal is also contingent on the gender-responsiveness of strategies targeted at achieving the other goals. Focusing on the mutually reinforcing nature of gender-related goals and targets, the chapter will first analyse how the SDG framework has been able to build on existing gender equality frameworks and, specifically, how it has addressed the limitations of the MDG framework. Next, highlighting three key policy areas—freedom from violence, capabilities and resources, and voice leadership and participation—the chapter will examine the current progress towards gender equality and explore future policy pathways. The chapter focuses on the policy environment in India and is supplemented with perspectives from Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and Nepal. It is argued that the new development consensus and normative declarations alone cannot guarantee verifiable results; policy solutions must address the multidimensional nature of gender inequality across all goals and targets. The chapter ends with highlighting the major gaps that remain in data availability and comparability in the subregion in the context of the SDG indicators, as well as the need for further clarity on the financial costs of gender equality SDG targets—proposing future policy pathways.
