The Tribune

By ALICIA WALLACE

THIS WEEK, Women Deliver—the largest global conference on gender equality—is taking place in Naarm, Melbourne, Australia. The conference opened on Monday afternoon with a welcome and ceremony by the Wurundjeri people–the traditional owners the land commonly referred to as “Melbourne.” There was also a pre-conference—Decolonizing Futures: First Nations Indigenous Women Advancing Treaty and Global Solidarity—held on Sunday with a specific focus on indigenous peoples, their knowledge, and their rights. This set the tone for the conference, positioning indigenous peoples as leaders, knowledge-holders, community builders, and hosts.

Speakers at the opening ceremony included Governor-General of the Commonwealth of Australia Hon. Sam Moisten AC, Queensland Senator Hon. Nita Green, Prime Minister of Tuvalu Hon. Feleti Penitala Teo, and Deputy Secretary-General of the United Nations Amina J. Mohammed.

Mohammed described the reality we face today, with women and girls bearing the brunt of poverty, hunger, extraction, and conflict. “Right now, the world is in a mess more than a decade in the making, from COVID-19 to conflicts and countless climate disasters. And, as ever, the weight of that mess lands on our shoulders. The resources to respond to the challenge are shrinking, not growing. The decade-long trend, where development assistance for gender equality was on an upward trajectory, is coming to an end.”

“Those pushing back against the rights of women, girls, and gender diversity are organized, they are well-resourced, and they are playing the long game,” she added. “We will not cede this space, not an inch of it. We need to take back the ground from the people trying to drag it away.”

This has been a recurring theme throughout plenary and concurrent sessions. Anti-rights actors are working to destroy what has taken decades of dedicated work, by women from the Global Majority, to build. It is imperative that we refuse to allow our work and the work of our ancestors to be undone, and that we refuse to be exhausted or discouraged by the rise of authoritarianism and anti-rights rhetoric.

In her opening remarks, Women Deliver CEO Maliha Khan pointed to the Melbourne Declaration, an outcome document of Women Deliver 2026, as a commitment for all participants to share. “What we’re asking of you all is to make this moment of crisis a moment of possibility,” she said. “The Melbourne Declaration is a shared commitment to rebuild a gender equality ecosystem too often shaped by donor priorities and weak accountability to people — and to root what comes next in human rights, solidarity, and the leadership of those most affected by injustice.”

The three-page outcome document for the conference, the Melbourne Declaration for Gender Equality, speaks directly to the obligations of States to protect, promote, and expand full access to human rights for all. It specifically names rights to bodily autonomy and freedom from violence and discrimination along with open democracies as critical components. More and more, civil society and multilateral organizations are turning attention to democracy, as the culture of governance is changing at the global and national levels, shrinking the space for civil society, reducing resources including funding, and creating increasingly unsafe environments for people who have been historically and systematically marginalized.

In every human rights space, there are high-stress conversations about the wave of conservatism that is affecting our daily lives. Anti-rights actors are heavily funded and highly coordinated, posing threats and significantly affecting even the spaces built for progressive movements. It is in this context that the Melbourne Declaration was drafted.

“We make this declaration at a moment when the wider field of actors and institutions shaping gender equality outcomes is in crisis,” it states. “Governments and political actors are actively rolling back, ignoring, and undermining human rights — including sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR), bodily autonomy, democratic rights, and civic space. Multilateral systems are under attack, and anti-rights actors are using them to advance their agenda. Rising authoritarianism, fundamentalism, and fascism aim to weaken progressive civil society and accountability mechanisms.”

The Melbourne Declaration makes six clear commitments:

    1    Orienting our work around States’ obligations and public accountability: We will focus our role on creating the conditions in which States uphold their responsibilities and in which people, civil society, and social movements can demand that States respect, protect, and fulfill the rights of all people and the planet.

    2    Creating the conditions for collective voice and social justice to thrive: We will ensure local civil society is adequately resourced, politically protected, globally connected, and locally rooted. We will ensure that the priorities, knowledge, language, and political aims of those most affected by injustice shape our work.

    3    Confronting unjust economic systems that deepen inequality and undermine rights: We will challenge debt burdens, austerity policies, and the global financial rules and systems that deepen inequality, undermine States’ ability to provide essential services and uphold their human rights obligations, and threaten the wellbeing of people and the planet.

    4    Transforming institutions to center local priorities and accountability to people: We will challenge models shaped by donor expectations, priorities, indicators, deliverables, and reporting cycles. Our work will hold national and multilateral institutions accountable and center locally defined priorities, movement leadership, and accountability to people, civil society, and those most affected by injustice.

    5    Standing united against militarism and for peace and justice: We refuse to be complicit in the normalization of war and the instrumentalization of the rights of girls, women, and gender-diverse people to justify conflict and violence. We also stand against the weaponization of militarized masculinities to recruit men and boys as instruments of war, creating conditions that deeply harm all people, including through sexual violence as a weapon of war.

    6    Rooting our transformation in solidarity and contributing to the dismantling of systems of oppression: We root our work in solidarity across movements and borders; center the Global Majority; and contribute to dismantling all forms of discrimination, including patriarchy, sexism, ageism, misogyny, racism, capitalism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, and colonialism — including as they show up in our sector, deny people their rights, and undermine justice.

Recommendations

    1    The Hollow Half: A Memoir of Bodies and Borders by Sarah Aziza. Join Feminist Book Club, hosted by Equality Bahamas and Poinciana Paper Press, in reading this book this month. The publisher describe The Hollow Half as “a brush with death. An ancestral haunting. A century of family secrets. Sarah Aziza’s searing, genre-bending memoir traces three generations of diasporic Palestinians from Gaza to the Midwest to New York City—and back.” Feminist Book Club will meet at Poinciana Paper Press, 12 Parkgate Road, on Wednesday, May 20 at 6pm to discuss the book. Register for updates at tiny.cc/fbc2026.

    2    Feminist Standards for Governance. Equality Bahamas will publish the people’s agenda for 2026 to 2031, a community-sources set of recommendations to guide the next government administration in meeting the needs of the people while leveraging our knowledge and skills as active participants in governance. Join the mailing list at equality-bahamas.kit.com to be among the first to receive the people’s agenda and follow @equality242 on Instagram for updates, shareable material, and announcements of in-person and virtual events designed for the public to engage with the recommendations.