Berlin: Germany’s foreign and development ministers Wednesday presented their government’s new feminist foreign policy guidelines that are supposed to ensure that all people “have the same right to representation and access to resources.”
The policy will consider and support especially the needs of women and girls in order to erase discrimination, which they say will lead to more stability in societies in general.
“We are not calling for a revolution here, but we are doing something that is self-evident,” German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock told reporters in Berlin.
“Feminist foreign policy runs through all areas of our foreign policy actions from humanitarian aid to stabilisation measures, peace missions and also foreign culture and education policy,” Baerbock added.
“We want to make societies fairer. And you can’t do without half of the potential, namely women, but they have to be taken into account,” Development Minister Svenja Schulze said.
Among other issues, the guidelines for a feminist development policy stipulate that in the future, more than 90 per cent of newly committed project funds should flow into global projects that also advance gender equality. In 2021, the figure was around 64 per cent, German news agency dpa reported.
Baerbock stressed that the government’s new foreign policy guidelines also include reaching more gender parity at home, specifically at the German foreign office, where currently only 26 per cent of ambassadors are female.
“We see that we can learn a lot from other countries,” the foreign minister said, adding that about 30 countries in the world have officially committed themselves to a feminist foreign policy “from Chile to Spain to Mongolia.”
Schulze said societies with more equality struggle less with hunger and poverty and are more stable overall.
“That’s why it’s simply a matter of common sense to pay particular attention in development policy to ensuring that women also have rights, that they have resources and that they are also represented,” Schulze said.
AP