Bringing tax justice and gender issues to the fore, APMDD joined 1,800 women from 130 countries last September 2016 in responding to the theme “Feminist Futures: Building Collective Power for Rights and Justice”.
Bringing tax justice and gender issues to the fore, APMDD joined 1,800 women from 130 countries last September 2016 in responding to the theme “Feminist Futures: Building Collective Power for Rights and Justice”. The international event was the 13th International Forum of the Association for Women’s Rights in Development (AWID) held in Brazil, its flagship triennial program.
The Forum enabled APMDD to pick up from the previous conference in Istanbul where its self-organized workshop on gender and tax justice was voted “most innovative” by the participants. At this gathering, APMDD took up more specific issues in a breakout session on “Tax Justice and Women’s Unpaid Care Work”. The well-attended session discussed the care labor that women disproportionately render and how they are further burdened by gender discriminatory tax laws and policies such as regressive indirect taxes. It also pointed out the need for reforming existing laws and developing taxation policy that justly credit care labor and its significant contributions to the economy and to human society as well as help shift norms and practices towards a more gender-equal sharing of care work.
Puspa Dewy (Solidaritas Perempuan Indonesia/APMDD), and Mae Buenaventura and Mary Claire Miranda from the APMDD Secretariat comprised the panel.
In another breakout session, APMDD highlighted gender and tax justice issues in mining-affected communities in the Philippines and Indonesia. This workshop on “Challenging Corporate Power, Demanding Accountability: Feminist Resistance Struggles and Strategies” was organized by the Economic Justice Programme of AWID.
The event focused on countering the corporatization of development agendas, institutions and resisting the commodification of livelihoods and the planet. On APMDD’s part, we shared the gender and tax justice issues confronted by mining-affected communities, such as the destruction of women’s livelihoods; and showed how perspectives on gender and tax justice help sharply frame women’s resistance to these big scale mining companies. The presentation was informed by the outcomes of the conference early this year held jointly with UN Women, on women in climate and mining-impacted communities in the Philippines.
APMDD joined panelists from the Global Policy Forum (GPF), International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) and La Via Campesina (Honduras).