Introduction: The G20 Summit in New Delhi, India, wrapped up earlier this month with a Leaders’ Declaration issued under the theme of “One Earth, One Family, One Future.” While much of the media coverage has focused on the geopolitical implications of the summit, this year’s declaration also made significant strides looking to gender equality and women’s empowerment, including a direct call for increased efforts to quote “close gender gaps and promote the full, equal, effective and meaningful participation of women in the economy as decision-makers.”
To take a closer look at how women’s empowerment was incorporated into the G20 process, I’m pleased to welcome Ayaka Matsuno, director of the Gender Investment and Innovation Program at SPF. She also served as a co-head of the Japan Delegation for the Women20, or W20, which is an Engagement Group that advocates for the inclusion of gender-related issues in the G20 process.
Ms. Matsuno joined SPF World Views to look back on her work with the W20 in Japan, discuss the significance of the goals set in the G20 Leaders' Declaration, and explore the ways that economic empowerment can accelerate progress toward gender equality.
It has been a very busy time with the G20 Leaders’ Summit wrapping up earlier this week on September 10th in India, and there's a lot to dig into regarding the outcomes of that meeting. But before we jump into the results of the G20 summit itself, I wanted to discuss your work as a Japan representative for the Women 20 (W20) Engagement Group for the G20 process. First, could you just talk about your role was in the W20 process and what were the outcomes of that W20 meeting?
Ms. Matsuno: Thank you very much for this opportunity. My name is Ayaka Matsuno, the Director of Gender Investment and Innovation Program of the Sasakawa Peace Foundation.
And I'm very happy that I'm part of the co-head of the W20 Japan delegates this year. As you know, the W20 is one of the Engagement Groups for G20 and for specifically talking about women's economic empowerment. Each state of G20 member states have these delegates. In Japan, we have around 10 people all together and we formed this delegation from Japan. We have to come up with the W20 Communique, which will be fed into hopefully the G20 Leaders’ Declaration. Our role is to really make sure that the women's perspective is always incorporated into this G20 Leaders’ Declaration.
In terms of the process, we had a launch event in February this year in India. We divided into task forces and had numerous online meetings as well as having three different international conferences to put our communique together.
We started to discuss five priority areas: climate change, entrepreneurship, digital divide, education skills development and labor market participation, and grassroots leadership.
The priority areas are decided by the chair of W20, which is India this year. But then the W20 itself has been focusing on labor, finance, and also digital, so the three main topics are always there.
What were the main outcomes that were represented in the W20 Communique? What were the main points that were put through in that document?
Ms. Matsuno: We have five priority areas we wanted to be featuring, but on top of that we made it very, very clear that we cannot really keep repeating to talk about the same thing and then not really be accountable for what we have promised that we will do.
Each year we have the W20 Communique and part of the recommendation is integrated into the G20 Leaders’ Declaration. We think that “Oh, good! All of the G20 leaders have agreed to do this,” but then nobody was following up and making sure that progress was made, and there was no monitoring process. We made it very clear that we have to do that so that we can really reach the target that we set.
This year in the G20 Leaders’ Declaration, they took our recommendations seriously. That was one of the key points that is integrated into the G20 Leaders’ Declaration.
One specific target that they already committed to is halving gender digital divide by 2030. For the gender digital divide, we are talking about affordability, accessibility, literacy skills, and also the protection of women's rights. That's a very ambitious target, but they said that they would do it and they held ILO and OECD accountable for the annual progress report.
We didn't expect that ILO and OECD will be named to be that person to report back to the G20. But at least, the point is that everybody knows that this is time for us to really keep track of what kind of progress we have made and what is not done yet.
That’s such a key area. As you say, even if it's included in the Leaders’ Declaration, if there's no follow up, if there's no accountability, if there's nothing that comes after that, it’s just words on a page.
To integrate that seems like it was a really key aspect of W20 that was able to successfully be represented.
Ms. Matsuno: Yeah, we are very happy. After this G20 declaration came out, we in the W20 community are connected through WhatsApp, so all the messages coming in “congratulations!” and this and that. We thought that it was a pretty good result, this very ambitious target of halving gender digital divide by 2030.
Also, another target that is included is the Brisbane target. The Brisbane target is really the reason why W20 exists. It was already set up in 2018, basically talking about closing the gap of labor force participation by 25% by 2025.
And then we have another two years, less than two years? And still we haven't really been tracking the efforts, so we really have to accelerate our efforts so that we can make the Brisbane target achievable.
That's interesting, the goal being 2025. When that goal was set, perhaps that seemed quite in the distance and now it’s here. Did that come into the dialogue at all as you were talking about how to move these projects forward, the fact that these deadlines that had been set for a long time are at our doorstep right now?
Ms. Matsuno: Yeah, definitely. We always keep track on our time that is remaining for the target. But then in principle everybody says that to achieve gender equality we need to have another 200 years or something, so we have to accelerate the process. That's the common understanding of everybody that works in W20.
One of your responsibilities was taking the W20 Communique to the Japanese government to inform their process with the G20 summit itself. I'm curious if there was any specific area that piqued the interest of the Japanese government representatives who you met, or was there any indication of where Japan itself maybe is focusing its energy regarding W20 initiatives?
Ms. Matsuno: We basically gave our W20 Communique, translated into Japanese, to the G20 Sherpa, Mr. Ono, Deputy Vice Minister for Foreign Affairs. He is a key person for G20.
Whenever we exchanged our view on what is included and what is very important for us, he was very, very happy to learn all the five priorities. But then also he mentioned about this important feature of the nexus between climate change and gender.
So this year, for the first time, G20 Leaders’ Declaration included this important point. We have been talking about it for the last three four years on different platforms, and then people started to realize that the impact that climate change will bring is disproportionately affecting women and girls.
This year, for the first time, they clearly stated in the preamble, as well as also dedicating one section where they start talking about how we need to accelerate mitigation and adaptation of climate change using women and girls and their power and their agency to accelerate the process.
I also would like to ask about any areas that you wish had been included in the Leaders’ Declaration that perhaps did not make it this time.
Ms. Matsuno: We have these five priority areas, right? Climate change; entrepreneurship; digital divide; education, skills development, and labor market participation; and grassroots leadership. So actually all of them are integrated into this Leaders’ Declaration in one way or another. But grassroots leadership is one theme that W20 India was very much promoting.
Whenever we went to the W20 conference in India, they tried to really feature the different kinds of success and also best practices for women's economic empowerment. Not only women entrepreneurs who are top unicorn CEO type of women, but at the same time, there are some micro entrepreneurs in the rural area in India, who may not be really speaking English or have a higher education level, but still they came up with such a unique empowerment system called self-help group, and they try to really build the capacity to grow together with other women. So that was very interesting and we wanted to really see that featured in the Leaders’ Declaration a little bit more.
They didn't really use the words “women's leadership” or “women-led development,” which was the theme of W20. But instead, the G20 Leaders’ Declaration talked about women as decision makers. So, a slightly different way of saying, but then basically the essence was included.
Now we have this Leaders’ Declaration with these benchmarks and this monitoring mechanism embedded into it. What are you hoping to see happen next?
Ms. Matsuno: A big step forward is that they decided to set up an official working group for women's empowerment for G20 Women’s Ministerial, which is the most institutionalized mechanism for G20, meaning that they really wanted to put women's empowerment at the core of G20’s work.
We don't know the detail of how it's going to function or who is going to be included in that working group. But when we have this working group directly working with G20 ministerial, we can actually voice our concern directly to the center of G20 discussion. So that is a really good step forward.
I would like to transition our conversation a bit to your work specifically in the foundation. And I think a lot of it overlaps quite substantially with the conversation we've been having so far. I'd like to ask you to tell us what exactly the Gender Investment and Innovation Program does and what is the ultimate goal of this program.
Ms. Matsuno: So basically, our program was starting from Asia Women Impact Fund at our core. The Asia Women Impact Fund is a very unique initiative done by a private foundation like us. Basically, we wanted to utilize a part of our endowment to invest into funds that are specifically targeting women and girls and then bring positive change into their life.
Actually, when we talked about the G20 halving digital divide by 2030, USAID started an initiative called Women in Digital Economy Initiative. They mobilized already 515 million USD for this initiative and then also brought so many different governments and also the private sector to work with that. As part of this, the Australian Government is investing in Women's World Banking for this initiative.
Women's World Banking is an NGO based in America, and they focus on financial inclusion for women around the world. They have an investment wing and they set up this fund called Women's World Banking Capital Partners II, which is basically focusing on investment to financial service providers that are specifically promoting financial inclusion for women around the world.
Actually, the Asia Women Impact Fund at SPF is an investor to this Women's World Banking Capital Partners II, so indirectly we are supporting this initiative of digitalization.
Going back to the Asia Women Impact Fund, you know, we wanted to focus in Asia. We have this investment wing that really tried to promote investment flowing into women's empowerment and also gender equality. We thought that we need to really have capacity building for the recipient of the fund, which is women entrepreneurs.
We started to utilize our project funds to really work with establishing or strengthening ecosystems for women entrepreneurs in different countries in Southeast Asia. Especially we are now doing it in the Philippines, and we will start working in Indonesia and Cambodia.
Altogether, our program is focusing on women’s economic empowerment. Whenever you have economic empowerment, that really has a multiplier effect and then women become more confident, women have a little bit more voice over their family business or family issues, and then also if they can actually have income, they can translate that income into children's education and health.
It is very clear that focusing on economic empowerment is a kind of shortcut for us to really make the impact for women's life. So that's why we decided to focus on economic empowerment.
Outro: That was our conversation with Ayaka Matsuno, director of the Gender Investment and Innovation Program at SPF. You can learn more about this program by visiting our website at
www.spf.org/en. That’s all for this episode of SPF World Views. Thanks for joining us, and we’ll see you next time.
