Maher Sattar
While tariffs are making headlines, Trump 2.0 is also upending the results of decades of international collaboration at the United Nations.
The U.S. stood firm against a strong push by advocacy groups to get those attending the U.N.’s annual meeting on gender equality in March to commit to protecting women’s sexual and reproductive health and rights. It has also rejected the Sustainable Development Goals, a framework for international development that was unanimously adopted by all 193 U.N. member states 10 years ago. The SDGs were the successor to the Millennium Development Goals, an earlier set of targets that are credited with saving millions of lives and helping almost half a billion people lift themselves out of poverty. This followed the Trump administration’s announcements that it would be leaving the World Health Organization and the United Nations Human Rights Council.
In order to better understand how a U.S.-led push to reject multilateralism will affect women’s movements, I spoke to Happy Mwende Kinyili, co-executive director of the world’s oldest international women’s fund Mama Cash. I also reached out separately to Jennifer Rauch at Fos Feminista, an international alliance that plays a leading role in organizing for sexual and reproductive rights. They told me they are bracing for a long year of conservative efforts to roll back agreements on topics ranging from climate to health to human rights.
At the same time, they stressed that feminists need to fight to preserve the power of these multilateral spaces — women’s issues tend to be transnational, they said, and there simply isn’t another choice. Their responses have been edited for length and clarity.
Maher Sattar: It’s 2025. The world is on fire. Why do I care whether or not certain words or phrases make it into a piece of paper coming out of the U.N.? What are the real-world impacts of what ends up on these statements?
Happy Mwende Kinyili: In all honesty, that’s a question we also ask ourselves a lot. Mama Cash is part of a collaboration of women’s funds and women’s rights organizations. And I remember about three to five years ago, actually asking each other in that space, ‘why do we engage in these global negotiations’?
I hold a Kenyan passport. A lot of these political conversations will start off often in the global north, so New York, Geneva. You get this nice paper [political declaration or commitments], and they try to nationalize it [as national action plans or frameworks]. I think Kenya has some of the best strategic frameworks on HIV-AIDS and gender. But when I walk into a hospital, there’s no gender-based violence test.
It’s inefficient. At the same time, it matters, because this is the system we have right now.
Jennifer Rauch: I see advocacy relating to the U.N. as cyclical. As a citizen of X country, you can see what your government has agreed to at the highest level of multilateralism. You can then take that back to your community and your government and say — and I’m just putting this out as an example — ‘you committed to ensuring the right to menstrual health for all women and girls in rural areas.’
And if they’re not implementing it, then you can also say, ‘hey, government, I can shame you now at the highest level.’ You can use it as this global-to-local/local-to-global advocacy and accountability structure.
So what are we seeing in the hospital as a result of all these papers?
Kinyili: It means, for example, clinics run by the state that are providing services for men who have sex with men. They are identified as a key community within the frame of Kenya’s national strategic plan.
Or sex workers, when they face some kind of police violence, can go into a state-run clinic and get services.
Rauch: In the Philippines, the ICPD [International Conference on Population and Development] program of action influenced their national policies on abortion. [Maher: waiting on more details]
The U.N. is one of the few fora, really, where governments from all over the world can come and meet and hash out agreements or disagreements on, well, any issue.
Kinyili: It’s not perfect, but it is better than if that whole thread didn’t work. We’re seeing very active efforts to dismantle our multilateral system, and we do not have an alternative frame in which states can be in negotiation with each other.
Borders are drawn up. They’re artificial. Most issues that we are trying to address as feminist actors are transnational by design. So we do need places where states are in negotiation with each other, as long as we have a nation-state system. That’s how we’ve, for now, organized ourselves globally.
The DEFUND act in the U.S. Senate would effectively withdraw the U.S. from the U.N., as well as about $13 billion in funding — around a quarter of the U.N.’s budget. The Trump administration also criticizes this system for being inefficient and ineffective. It seems they want to replace the multilateral system with bilateralism, or even unilateralism.
Rauch: It is certainly true that we’re seeing a push. We’re seeing a tendency of conservative governments to try to disrupt the multilateral process, to say that the U.N. isn’t functioning.
We’re seeing a kind of obstructionist approach. What these tactics do is make it impossible to come to any kind of consensus, or only allow a watered down consensus.
The idea is that you water down language that’s in the document, and then make it so that member-states would rather not have an agreement than agree to something that goes below the standard that’s already been set. And then you can paint this narrative that the U.N. isn’t working, because we just spent all this time negotiating something but we didn’t have an outcome on it.
And that narrative is a false narrative, because you’re ignoring why that happened.
Kinyili: I see it as taking advantage of something that has flaws. Like the wall has cracks, let’s just keep penetrating the cracks and the whole thing will come down.
There has been a deliberate effort for a long time to change the shape of how these negotiations work, because folks on the political right are convinced that those of us on the left have been winning too much.
At CSW69, I would say I sensed an air of panic, and perhaps deflation.
Rauch: I wouldn’t say deflation. I don’t think that that is accurate.
People are feeling discouraged. Rightfully so. But what has been so inspirational for me is learning from older feminists in the movement, who have gone through multiple geopolitical shifts. I find a lot of hope in hearing from them that we have weathered this before, that we’re not going to stop fighting.
Kinyili: When you said there’s panic, I agree. I see people running around in fear and wanting to cower in the face of what feels like really strong pushback and pressure. I kept seeing people saying, ‘oh my gosh, the funding is getting cut, things are getting hard, we need to shut down.’
That’s not an option. We need to take that option off the table. The grassroots people are not doing this because they’re getting paid. They’re doing this because this is survival. Are we actually following the brave leadership of people who have no choice? We can’t give up because there is no plan B.
