Older women and the sustainable development goals: a part to play

AGE participated in a meeting of the European Anti-Poverty Network in Belgrade, Serbia, which looked at the issue of gender and poverty and at the interlinkages between women’s poverty and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). While action for women is crucial to attain most of the SDGs, AGE highlighted the particular necessity to focus on older women as well.

EAPN_gender_poverty_PR2018 The European Anti-Poverty Network (EAPN), of which AGE is a member organisation, is a non-for-profit network of organisations who are fighting poverty and aim at raising awareness of the problem of poverty in the European Union. AGE took part in one of its internal meetings, meeting a representative from UN Women Regional Office for Europe, Dr Sabine Freizer. While the 5th SDG is focussing explicitly on gender equality, Dr Freizer emphasised that gender equality is a transversal issue addressed in almost all other SDGs. For instance, SDG1 on ending poverty sets the target to ensure that all men and women have equal rights to economic resources.

In line with our press release for international women’s day, we emphasised that poverty is a significant problem for many older women, who are faced with a gender pension gap of almost 40% and are much more often living alone, therefore bearing higher housing costs. Given the differences in healthy life years between women and men, women also spend a larger share of their lives in ill-health, where they would also need additional financial resources to cover out-of pocket payments in health care.

The seminar was an occasion for EAPN to launch a report on gender and poverty, available online.

For further information, please contact Philippe Seidel from AGE Secretariat: philippe.seidel@age-platform.eu

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