Healthy, Dignified, and Prosperous: Older women thriving through better laws, policies and practices (CSW70 Side Event)

Thank you all for joining us for this CSW event on healthy, dignified and prosperous older women thriving through better laws, policies and practices. Many thanks to those of you who are joining us online and in person for this event. We have a packed room. It has been a joint effort with aarp, the World Bank Human Capital Project, the World Bank's Women Business and the law team, the UNFPA and UN Women. We are grateful to HelpAge International and Co Impact for contributing as well.

Our partnership reflects a commitment to aging and gender equality. And for the first time in its 70 sessions, the Commission on the Status of Women has included a dedicated focus area on the achievement of gender equality and empowerment of older women. Yes, that deserves a round of applause.

Here at the un. We at AARP are proud to be supporting the elaboration of a new human rights treaty to protect all older persons, including older women. There are so many pieces of this puzzle. Older women's equality is necessary for moral and equity reasons. But there are also some very practical policy reasons to be exploring older women's lives, especially in low and middle income countries.

Right now, more than 400 million women aged 60 or more currently live in low and middle income countries. They are economic actors whose unpaid and paid contributions have measurable macroeconomic value. And that value is set to grow 24 years from now. Some 900 million women aged 60 or more will reside in these countries. 900 million.

We are so pleased to be drawing on a new report for this event, Prosperous, Healthy and Policy Pathways for Older Women in Developing Countries. Please pick up an executive summary here in the room and find the full report online at the World Bank Group's Human Capital Project website. To begin today, we are so pleased to have a Fireside Chat moderated by Lena Walker, Senior Vice President of Global Thought Leadership at aarp. Lena, you have the floor.

Hello. Yes, I'm delighted to be here during CSW 70 to moderate this panel of distinguished guests. Thank you for the introductions, Bethany. Let me just say a little bit about aarp. We are a nonprofit, nonpartisan membership organization whose mission is to empower people to choose how they live as they age.

And AARP represents the 125 million Americans who are over 50. And while we are primarily a US organization, our work is guided by our founder, Ethel Percy Andrus. Her vision was that what we do, we do for all. And we have an international department that works with global partners and many of whom are in this room and online. Today's session is about how we can help older women around the world, particularly in low and middle income countries thrive through better laws, policies and practices.

And the statistics that Bethany shared are really astounding. We will see enormous growth in the number of older women. They will live longer and yet have poorer health and more financial uncertainty, greater unmet long term care needs as they're more likely to be living alone. And yet they contribute significantly in ways that are unseen, unmeasured or uncompensated. And we can do better and we can really change that trajectory.

And that's why we have before us today our two panelists. And we'll hear about the policies and programs that will show promise. And with that, let me turn to my guest. Joining me on this panel is De D Gambojanda, Deputy Executive Director for Normative Support, UN System Coordination and Program Results at UN Women, and De D. Smith, Acting Deputy Executive Director of Program at unfpa. Welcome to both of you.

So let me just dive right into the first question. Given the growing numbers of older women globally and the need to integrate aging in gender and gender in aging policies, how would your organization see current policies on gender and aging change if we increase older women's participation in policy making? Maybe I can start with you, Dede Gambojanda.

Thank you. Thank you so much.

This is supposed to be a fireside chat. So we will chat, we will talk, we'll do storytelling. My brother Pio, when it's in the evening and we are by our mother's fire, we talk about those issues, even those which are uncomfortable and critical. So it's great for us to have so many midwives of this event. I want to thank all the partners who are really giving life to this event and recognize the excellencies, the ministers.

So let me start with this little story on the fireside chat. My mother was a grandmother. When she gave birth to me, he had coughed pregnancy and her son already had a child.

So just imagine an older woman getting pregnant.

That was my mother. Then my father died. She was already an older woman.

She was under a lot of pressure from the relatives culturally to inherit her, you know, wife. Inheritance used to happen and it still happens in some communities. And her land was under risk. The family wanted to take her land because a woman, a widow, is perceived at times to have less rights. It was with my own eyes, with my own experience, to be raised by this mother, by my mother in my village.

And I understand what it means when you talk about older women who live in rural communities, who are innovative, who are hardworking, but who can also be under a lot of prejudice. So I really want to start by appreciating, including my government, to appreciate our governments who are putting in place policies that protects the rights of all women and girls, including the rights of my own mother. So we've seen a lot of effort around law reform in Zimbabwe. I can't speak for Zimbabwe, but I can speak of how it protected my own mother and how the land that was under risk is now the land which we built Rosaria Memorial Trust in order to protect more women. This is a fireside chat.

So I wanted to start with a personal story in order to say it's possible to change laws as UN women as the United Nations. I'm very, very excited and I want to thank our member states to say at this UN Commission on the Status of Women's 70th session, there was an intentional decision to say this is a CSW for all women and girls, including older women, that there was an intentional effort to have the ministerial roundtable on older women as part of the formal processes and the formal arrangements of the Commission on the Status of Women. Thus, the starting point, the critical importance of having international multilateral mechanisms commit and create the space not just to discuss, but to have older women participate. So for all the older women in this room, I don't know what age it starts from. I just want to say thank you so much.

You hold the sky. You have held the sky. And who we are today is also because of the work that you have done. I'm also saying this because two days ago I sat in the meeting of the International Council of Women, which was founded in 1855. The World YWCA founded in 181888 for the National Council Zonta Soroptimist we are talking about women who are who have passed on.

But the struggle for gender equality has been the lifetime of women. So I also want to just recognize that older women have invested in advancing gender equality and created who we are today. So we need to do a couple of things. I will leave my brother to talk about the statistics. You will talk about all the data and the statistics you ask.

That's what you do on the fireside. You pass on the baton if you need to. What we are dealing with is around a whole group of human beings called women who have invested the rest of their lives to lifting families communities, then find themselves on the margins of public policy, find themselves less protected by the CARE policies. That's why we are very excited to give the ECOSOC giving a CARE policy resolution adopted. We need to frame the issue differently.

We need to recognize that when older women are in the room, policymakers clearly see that poverty and insecurity in old age are are not inevitable consequences. But this can be addressed in terms of the decisions that are made. Lower wages for women. It means when a person becomes older, they are less protected, less supported. Interrupted career due to unpaid care work, the limited access to pension, the barriers to land and inheritance, like I talked about my mother or all these are barriers and injustices in the early lives of women which then impact older women much more.

These are structural issues and require structural responses. Gender responsive pension reform, recognition of unpaid care in social protection, the enforcement of inheritance and property rights and investment in long term care. These are some of the issues that also came out of the roundtable. Just two other points. We need to continue to shift the narrative that older women are no longer seen as primary recipients of policy, but also as agents of change.

Caregivers, community leaders, knowledge holders and contributors to economic and social life. With the huge HIV experiences that we had, especially in Africa and southern Africa, we saw older women standing up to come again into public space to offer care for orphans. And this for us is very important. As part of that recognition, when populations age, it's not that they are a cost to society, but we also need to see the contribution in value, the contributions that have been made so that it's not just about vulnerability, it's a cost and what should we do? But we need to value what women have contributed in society and continue to contribute before the rice gets cold.

Because when we are by the fireside, you are also eating. You don't just sit by the fireside and chat without eating. So we need to have a little bit of something greener.

Let me conclude what our evidence is saying. We cannot design policies without data. Data is super important in order to know the magnitude of the issues, in order to know the characteristic of the issues that we are seeking to address, and in order to identify the level of intervention. At times the level of intervention has to be with the girls in order to improve women's lives in older age. At times we just have to deal with, with the support and the intervention with the older women themselves and much more directly.

Therefore, sex and age disaggregated data across the full life course is very, very important. I would like. I'm very. As UN women, we are very excited to be working with the Office of the High Commission on Human Rights on data with UNFP and others. But the effort to develop a treaty is very profound.

And two days Ago, we had the CEDAW committee talk about gender stereotypes. We need to address gender stereotypes relating to aging in many of our villages, in many of our communities, when you are old and poor, you can be assumed to be a witch. When you are old and poor, yes, at times seem to be the one giving bad luck to the little ones who cannot get employment. Even when just the employment market is just dire by itself, this old woman is blamed. And these are real everyday life issues around gender stereotyping that is very critical for us to address.

Let me stop there. Otherwise we'll continue to go on. The fire would go down. Oh, I love this fireside chat. We will have more time for more

questions, I hope, later. And so, Dee Dee Smith.

Okay, great. Thank you very much. Good afternoon, everybody.

And it's the second week of CSW and we're all still here. And it's great to see such a packed room and a lot of energy still around these halls. So thank you so much for that. And I see some familiar faces. We've been in different FORA where we're talking about these issues and what's been really, you know, heartening over the last couple of years is to see that expansion of FORA where we are discussing the importance of this issue and trying to get other voices, other ears listening to these challenges and, and to recognize the intersectionality of what we're talking about and how it's all connected in that circle.

I want to begin by thanking very much our friends at AARP and at the World bank for spearheading this conversation. We can't do it without leaders like you as well. And it's not just during csw. You are showing a lot of leadership throughout the year, and we do appreciate to partner that. And it's always good to sit, whether it's by the fire or wherever, to sit beside my big sister, Narad Tsai.

So I'm Irish. I think they're telling me to speak to the data because if I start telling stories, we'll never get out of here. But I just want to reassure you, in Ireland, when we're having fireside chats, we definitely would have something to eat and we wouldn't just be drinking sparkling water. But such are the times we're at. But, you know, before we dive into the data, I do want to put a premise on the table, which is that there is a woman behind every statistic that we're talking about.

And maybe she's here. Maybe you're part of that, part of that lived experience, or maybe she's out there somewhere. And I think what's really important is that we recognize that at a time when women should be enjoying retirement or older, later stages of life, it can be, you know, when they should be experiencing a time of peace and security and reflection. It can often be a time when a lifetime of subtle inequalities are actually coming to the fore and where she's not having either the peace or the reflection or the security that she deserves. And we see that in the data.

So let's quickly talk a little bit about the data. Older women, as we have heard, are the majority actually of the elderly population across the globe. They represent 56% of the global population who are aged over 60. And this jumps to 65% for those who are aged 80 and older. And so it makes having a gender lens really essential for any, for any aging policy.

And a lifetime of inequality leads to financial insecurity in old age. Older women often arrive at the age of 65 with like we've heard, with fewer assets, limited pension coverage due to lower lifetime in earnings, but also higher unpaid care burdens which are the cumulative result of structural discrimination that has faced her across the life course. This doesn't happen by accident. We know that gender equality is a very, gender inequality is actually a very intentional movement. We see that alive and well in the anti rights movement that is still happening in the year 2026 and it's been here for decades and centuries before.

And I think, you know, this cumulative result of structural inequalities, that lifetime of discrimination when it comes to education, to wages, to unpaid care burden, have disproportionate effects on women. And that's why it's really important for us at UNFPA is to always advocate that we are looking through these, through the gender lens, but also a human rights lens. The dual focus is really important so that we can ensure policies are actually comprehensively addressing the issues that are on the table. So for instance, if you're looking at social protection systems that give credit for caregiving years and non contributory pensions are essential to combat the financial poverty of older women. That's only one part of the challenge.

The global response has to be holistic and right now is not. It has to address these cumulative inequalities, but it also has to address not just economic security but, but also ensuring that older women are able to afford a life of dignity and of good health, full health. This includes ensuring access to gender responsive services that support bodily autonomy beyond fertility. So looking at post menopause Care and reproductive cancer screenings. One issue that will very often surprise people in public forum, maybe not you, but when I'm speaking on this issue, is that many surveys still stop collecting data on women after the age of 49.

And in practice, okay, so it does surprise some of you. In practice, this means that the experience of older women simply doesn't appear in the data sets. And nobody's asking for it.

We are, but those who fund it and need to place the investment aren't asking for it. And I think we all agree that, you know, that critical next step, like Neerad said, is expanding our age and sex disaggregated data. And that's how we bring also that hidden epidemic of violence and neglect out of the shadows. So

to kind of recap, you know, recognizing inequality at age 70 often begins with the denial of choice at age 17. And we have to ensure that older women aren't seen as dependents, but actually as active contributors who sustain families and in many instances communities. So to adopt an aging lens in a gender strategy, we must extend our work beyond the reproductive years in order to be truly comprehensive. We want to have strategies that are extending their scope beyond reproductive years, but to actually incorporating the unique needs, amplifying the voices of older women. And we also need to make sure that gender responsive services, including for sexual and reproductive health and survivors of gender based violence, that these are accessible to her wherever she is throughout her life course.

We have an example of some of our work that we do in Georgia and across Eastern Europe and Central Asia around our demographic resilience program. And really there it's about looking at how to strengthen the use of data to inform policies on labour markets, care systems, social protection. And importantly, it's looking at addressing the structural inequality, specifically the barriers to women's participation in economic activity, but also the unequal burden around unpaid care work. And so I think, you know, when we do this, when we apply that human rights, that gendered lens, when we have the right kind of data, when we invest in data, and data takes time, data takes money, it often outlives the politician because he or she is on a four year trajectory. And so we always need to make the case about the centrality of data to broader, longer term, macroeconomic sustainable developments that are going to get a country on its correct trajectory over a 30, 40 year lifeline.

Let me stop there.

Worth repeating. What I heard you say was we need to amplify voices of older women. We need to consider that these are structural issues that require structural response. And our policies have to be holistic and comprehensive.

And finally that poverty and financial insecurity are not inevitable if we change our framing. So I think these are great points. We are running a little bit short on time. So I'm going to offer you an opportunity for one minute final words to this question. And it is, we live in a demographically dynamic world.

Many countries are rapidly aging and other countries have a large youth population. But they're going to start aging too and need to start preparing for the future. What do these shifts mean for your work? And I'm sorry to shorten it, but can we have final words for one minute? Thank you.

See, and I only started on the data. But you know, I think, you know what's very interesting is that the stories that we're seeing are not the same everywhere actually. So the story of Europe and East Asia, that has a very rapid population aging in sub Saharan Africa, you have populations that remain very young today. But despite that, the connector, each of those in those settings are becoming aging countries. And I think so even in the most absolute youthful, in the most youthful nations, rather, the absolute number of older persons is growing.

And so the real question is how prepared are societies and how prepared are policymakers. And for many years population change has been very much defined as a sort of something to fear, this population anxiety. And very much that has a very nasty face to it. It is a pro natalist approach that you then see on the part of governments that uses a woman's body to respond to government's ineffective policy planning. So really what we're trying to do is shift the narrative from demographic anxiety to, you know, demographic resilience.

We're trying to get countries to demography proof their societies using, you know, population data, but also foresight that's going to help inform labor markets. But eventually, essentially it's about that young woman. Actually it all starts with her and her having that ability to choose and when she's able to choose, if and when and with whom and how many children she wants to have. When she has the education that she needs to participate in the workforce, then she's building the human capital that's actually going to sustain not just her, not just her community, but also the broader society. So it actually comes to choice for the 17 year old or earlier and kind of building that through, accompanying her through that life course approach.

When governments see the connection, rather than isolating these things, I think that's when we get better responses. Thank you so much for that.

Thank you. Thank you so much. I want to build on what my brother Pio had said and in his closing, I think what is critical is really for us to adopt this life course approach with intentionality. With intentionality and not a by the way, because then it enables us to have a full picture of the total impacts of inequalities, but continue to lift and recognize the role of older women within all the work that we do as UN women. We are saying really it's critical for us to continue to look at the issues around women and decision making and older women and their decision making about their lives, but also knowing that many are elders in the community.

That's where we also go to for advice. So the role of women in older women in decision making is so critical because decision making for women is not just positional, it's influencing perpetuity. So to recognize that and to invest in that is important. Secondly, end violence against older women. Neglect is violence, abuse is happening, structural abuse is happening.

Economic abuse is happening. So really addressing the issues of violence against older women is so, so critical. Thirdly, it's around economic security. I think in the last 20 minutes we talked the whole range from gender, pay gap, inheritance, property rights, the economic security of older women. It's possible for us to secure that in a clear way.

I also want to bring two last issues which are around the humanitarian response and within the context of peace and security. We have to understand that at times older women are left without support when others are able to move to refugee camps to be protected. When people are doing data collection, they're asking for the head of the household. They are not counting the older women who may be by themselves. So that whole area of humanitarian response, peace and security requires us to lift and to have an intentionality.

So it's really about laws, policies and norms. It's about strengthening our institutions, including implementation of the CARE policies and the protection mechanisms that we are putting in place. It's also about strengthening networks and groups, the peer groups of older women. And at times they are excluded from getting resources to run their small, their clubs because we are thinking of the big organizations. But it might be 7, 8, 10 women coming together every Friday to just share what is happening to their lives and to say, but the accountability, the rules of accounting and everything we need to find mechanisms and we would like to hear from Help Edge on how we can do that.

The issue of resources is always raised on all the world has less resources. Older women are people who have invested everything for the societies we are in. And yet when we need resources to support the efforts of older women, we say there's no money, but they are the primary investors for 70 years, 80 years. And yet. And yet.

And yet. So this, the issue of resources is very important. I always ended this. CSW has been continuing emphasizing for us as UN women, it's a gross injustice. Inequality hurts, discrimination hurts, lack of access to resources hurts.

But the most critical is when we see trillions of dollars spent on military expenditure destroying what the older women have built with their bare hands for the rest of their lives. We need to shift from military security to human security in order to offer support of social cohesion and protection to the important work that we do in communities and with older women. Thank you very much. Thank you very much.

With that, my sincere thanks to Ded Gambijunda and to Ded Smith for this wonderful fireside conversation. And maybe we can continue with food one day. And with that, let me Turn over to Dr. Wendy Cunningham. Super. Thank you.

Hello everyone. And what an inspiring way to start our conversation during this, during this time that we have together. So I am Wendy Cunningham. I am a lead economist at, at the World bank and I am also part of a team that is leading work on demographic change at the World Bank. And through our work, we were fortunate to partner with the AARP who encouraged us to really take a look at older women.

And we did, and it was eye opening to us. So we put down our results in a short paper that we actually have at the door for you, you to pick up if you'd like to, on your way out. So what I'd like to do in these eight minutes is share with you, get down and dirty with the data a little bit and share with you what the data, what the data are showing, both in terms of what are the successes, what are the challenges and where we can go from a policy point of view. So as we are all fully aware of that the world is aging, whether it's a high population growth country or a country that's maybe losing population. In all countries there are more older people than there ever have been before and that the trend will continue.

And we see this in developing countries as well. But what's kind of missing from the conversation.

Is the older population. And as we've heard, women play a prominent role. And so what we propose is that women are shaping the global story of old age. So let's start by taking a look at numbers. I'm an economist and so that's what I default to.

But we've heard this statistic already that there are a lot of older women in developing countries. And the numbers will only grow. So today, as both of our Fireside Chat participants mentioned, There are approximately 400 million women over the age of 60 who are now living in low and middle income countries. In 25 years, this number is expected to more than double to about 900 million women over the age of 60. So what this means is that today women over the age of 60 are 12% of the female population.

Population in low and middle income countries. This will rise to 24% in just 24 years. And these growth trends are similar. Whether you take age 65 as a cutoff, age 50 as a cutoff, age 70 as a cutoff, we're seeing this trend. So as we know, these trends, on the one hand, these trends are very positive.

Oops, I don't want you to look at that one yet. These trends are very positive since older women make significant contributions. And the data tell us, as we all know and have heard, that women are active, engaged and contributing to society in a lot of different ways. So they may be your grandmother who is caring for young chargers, or even her own daughter, who's not a grandmother yet, would be the mother, of course, but also they're entrepreneurs who are running businesses and hiring people and making significant, significant contributions to the economy. There are also political leaders who are standing up and kind of ushering us all through what's coming next.

They're community volunteers, they're us who are sitting around this virtual table wherever we might be. Older women are there. So let's take a look at some numbers. And these are data from Colombia. And the data come from the Counting Women's Work database, which is a part of the National Transfers Account project that is led by some of the top demographers in the world.

And using these data, we found that at age 60, Colombian women on average spend about 10 hours weekly in a job. Now this is an average. So some women are working, are not working at all, others are working more than full time, others are working part time. And that's that green, you know, kind of curve on the bottom. So if you look at age 60, about 10.

However, if you look at the top, the dotted line, women spend about 55 hours per week in any kind of work. So what is the difference between that 10 hours and that 55 hours? Well, that's the non market commitments. That's the time that women are spending caring for their home, caring for others, caring for their communities. And this commitment lasts far into older ages.

If we continue looking at this question, graph let's look at age 80. So we're really at the far right of this graph. Even at age 80, women report spending an average of 30 hours weekly on support to others, and most of that is in non market work. And we see similar trends to this. Whether we look at data from Togo, from India, Vietnam, Mexico, South Africa, the same pattern is showing.

So in short, across the world, women are productively engaged across a range of activities, not just market work, a range of activities well into their older years. However, there's also a darker side, and this is that women face significant challenges due to a lifetime of inequalities and economic and social factors in developing countries. So in the report, we grouped this into three categories. We group these challenges into three categories. First, let's start with poverty and income insecurity.

So as we've already heard during the fireside chat, women enter their older years with fewer sources of income than men do. So this is due to gender gaps in labor force participation when they were younger. It's due to higher rates of employment in the informal sector and is due to legal constraints that can make it difficult for women to accumulate assets. And so what that means is that over this life course, women are not accumulating the income streams that they would need to support themselves when they are no longer working or when they no longer have additional income earners in their household. So to give you an example, Data from the ILO tell us that only 41% of older women living in low lower end middle income countries receive a pension.

I'm sorry, that was only for lower middle income countries. If we look just at low income countries, the share of women who are receiving a pension is about 10%, 1 in 10 women. Similarly, we can look at DHS data, which is some of the one of the problems that Ded Smith pointed out because it only interviews women up to age 49. But the DHS data show have some questions on home ownership. And most of the countries that provided information on home ownership find that less than 10% of women actually own their own home.

And so they don't have this big asset that they could use to monetize in order to support themselves in older age. So let's move on to health. As we know, women live about two to four years long longer than men. But the WHO data show us that the gap in healthy life, not life, but in healthy life, is actually smaller. Women only live about one to two years of additional healthy life years than men do, which means women are living longer but less healthy.

So this is partly due to the burden of chronic disease that exacerbates and continues as one ages, such as D diabetes or heart disease. And it's also due to challenges that are unique to older individuals. So for example, a WHO study in 2015 estimated that the number of dementia cases globally will triple over the next 25 years. The number of people with dementia should triple. Most of this is going to be affecting women in poorer countries.

Health services in lower income countries tend to be more geared toward younger populations because that's where a lot of their population growth is coming from, right? However, that combined with a global shortage in understanding of older women's health needs, exacerbates the challenges facing women in the developing world. And then finally we look at the third. At the third category is that women face challenging living conditions. So data from the UN DESA in 2022 find that 1 in 4 women over the age 65 live alone.

This statistic is lower in developing countries. However, with smaller family sizes, with increasing migration, with increasing urbanization, family support systems are weakening with leaving women at a particular risk. However, there is a lot that policymakers can do. So this will require bringing a gender lens to aging policy. And bringing an aging lens to gender policy shouldn't say mistake on the slide.

Apologies. So first. So we break this again into three groups. First, first is prosperous aging. This means facilitating long term savings and access and access to pensions to create income streams later in life.

It also means investing in older women's health and skills so that those who wish to work longer can work longer and can do so more productively and earn higher. Secondly, it means support to healthy aging. That means expanding the reach and scale scope of services to meet women's unique health needs. But it also means fostering older women's social engagement to keep them physically and mentally agile and healthy. Third, support to dignified living.

This means programs that promote an accessible built environment, caregivers and services to enable prolonged independent living. It also means promoting a range of long term care options for older women who have differential needs. And of course, all of this is underpinned by the imperative to invest in today's girls and younger women. Investing today will enable them to accumulate personal and economic assets that will allow them to better manage their older years. And so with that, we invite you to pick up a copy of the report on your way out, or to take a look at the QR code, or you can access the report on the World Bank Human Capital Projects website.

And with that I thank you and I'd like to Pass it to Sarah.

Hello. Is it on? Yes. Hi. Thank you so much, Wendy, for that really excellent overview.

That was fascinating. My name is Sarah Craven. I'm the director of External Relations for unfpa. I'm going to do my one second of storytelling because I really appreciate when you talked about prosperous, healthy and dignified. My mother, at age 98, reluctantly I convinced her to move into independent, not assisted living.

And she was there for a few weeks and she was hating it. And she said to me, everyone here is very old.

I said, you are too. But my point is, I wish for everyone that we could be. My mother, who was sharp as a tack until she passed at 99 and a half. Amazing. She's amazing.

Her spirit here with us today. I am so in awe of this powerful group of women. Like this is so incredible, the energy at csw. But to have all you women here and a few men, PIO included. But thank you so much and it's really a pleasure to welcome you to this discussion on how older women can thrive through better laws, policies and practices.

As we've heard this morning, or excuse me, this afternoon, aging is shaped by inequalities that build up across the life course. And older women too often remain overlooked in policy and development discussions. At unfpa, we support a gender responsive, rights based life course approach to aging so that older persons, especially women, can live with dignity and security. So I am really lucky to be joined today by a very distinguished panel on what it takes to ensure that older women can age in healthy, dignified and prosperous risk conditions. Joining us are Doris King, who is the director of programs and Strategic Planning at CO Impact, Tanvi Patel, who is the gender Advisor at Helpage International, and Tea Trumbick, Manager of the World Bank's Group on Women Business and the Law Project.

So I want to thank you all for being here. And I'm going to start with you, Doris. CO IMPACT Support supports women to exercise power, agency and leadership at all levels. Could you speak to how inequalities accumulated across the life course shape the lives of older women? How can a greater emphasis on women's leadership help address these inequalities and shape programs and policies that are beneficial for older women?

Thank you. Thank you so much, Sarah. And thank you everyone here for this excellent event. So maybe I'll just start with a little intro about us. At CO Impact, we're a philanthropic collaborative that supports locally rooted actors to advance gender equality through systems change and through our portfolio.

I think what we see in our partners work is exactly the point that has been made in this, the discussions that have come about before that inequalities that older women face are rarely created in old age. They accumulate over a lifetime. And so when we talk about older women's well being, we're really talking about the cumulative effects of how society is valued or failed to value women's work, health, time and rights over decades. But really it's not just older women definitely defined by vulnerability. They're also essential contributors to families, communities and economies.

And both in an economic and a non economic so far away. And what we see is this,

when the narrative around these women do not fully capture everything that they contribute, there is such real consequences. For example, our partner Jemgan, who works in Indonesia, they work with women in agriculture. Over in Indonesia, nearly a million women that work in agriculture, many of them are so officially recorded as housewives. That label has real consequences.

It affects whether women can access land rights, credit training and government support, even when they are actively farming and contributing to local economies. But yet what you see when they're given the chance to organize and participate in village decision making, is that women organize, they improve how their communities are run, they improve how we think about the next generation. They think about reinvestment for climate resilience. And yet many of those times when they're not given a seat at the table, not given that voice, this remains invisible. And we see similar patterns elsewhere.

And this brings us to why to us, women's leadership matters so much. Because when women are absent from the grassroots level, all the way up to ministries, finance, courts, local governments and labour institutions, policies will overlook women's realities. But when women lead, they bring into focus what is so often invisible. The unpaid care, the informal work, the widowhood and the long term care needs. So another example here is another one of our partners, Azeres in Brazil, who was supporting them to help women municipal leaders implement Brazil's national care policy locally.

Because care policy is so important in shaping whether women can work, whether caregivers are supported, and whether women can age with dignity. And we see women leaders being the real muscle that brings to life the policy skeleton without it coming to life and coming to life in the lived experiences of older women, younger women, girls, men and boys, policies by themselves is really important, but insufficient. So I'll stop there.

Thank you so much, Doris.

The World Bank Group's Women Business and Law Project or program is a global benchmaking project that measures how law, regulations and policies shape women's economic opportunities and private sector development across 190 economies from the perspective of the World Bank. How do laws and policies shape women's economic opportunities from working age into old, older age?

Well, thank you so much for this question and thank you for the invitation to be here. So, as you mentioned, we measure laws and policies in 190 countries. But at its core, this report, Women, Business and the law 2026, which we just launched two weeks ago, looks at how equality or inequality accumulates across a woman's life and translates into very real economic outcomes from working age into older age.

Our framework is organized around 10 topics that follow women's working life course from safety and mobility to work and pay to child care, entrepreneurship, asset ownership, and ultimately pension and retirement security. This life cycle lens is critical because disadvantages only compound over time. Our 2026 report goes beyond assessing whether laws exist on paper. For the first time, we are systematically examining whether those laws are actually, actually implemented and enforced, which is critical. We're looking at institutions, policies, programs, budgets, and data and whether these exist.

This matters because legal equality without implementation does not deliver economic opportunity. And despite progress that we've seen in the laws and all the wonderful women here, we are seeing fewer women leaders, fewer women in board rooms, fewer women businesses. And those outcomes are not materializing. And so we are trying to understand what else is missing in this puzzle. The data are clear.

Inequality persists across countries. Women are still less likely than men to work to own and grow their businesses, despite often having equal or higher levels of education. This is why data, especially sex disaggregated data, are essential. Essential. And we heard that already today, if you cannot see inequality, you cannot fix it.

What we also know is that laws and policies make a measurable difference across all the ten topics we measure. Greater legal equality is positively associated with better economic outcomes from women, not only during their prime working years, but also in older age. For example, paid maternity and parental leave, protection from dismissal during pregnancy, pregnancy non discrimination in hiring, including based on age, and access to affordable quality child care. All help women stay attached to the labor market and extend their working lives. That continuity matters.

Career interruptions reduce lifetime earnings, pension contributions, and ultimately economic security in old age. And this is not anecdotal. Countries with more equal laws see higher female labor participation, higher rates of women's entrepreneurship, and more women in managerial roles. And what works for women works for their economies as well. If women globally had equal access to jobs, global GDP could rise by up to 20%.

Investments in childcare alone could generate nearly $4 in economic returns for every dollar invested, while sharply reducing gender earning gaps and and rising women's employment. And this is especially urgent for aging societies, including many advanced economies in Europe and Central Asian economies, while sustaining growth depends on fully mobilizing women's skills and experience across their entire life cycle. So in summary, laws and policies are not just about fairness. When designed, implemented and enforced effectively, they help level the playing field, strengthen women's financial health throughout throughout their lives and ensure greater economic security in older age while supporting stronger, more resilient economies for everyone.

Thank you so much and I'm going to turn to Tanvi. Although there is a growing evidence that discrimination affects women throughout their lives, older women are still largely missing from discussions on gender equality and sustainable development. Helpage, your organization has called for SDG data on gender equality to be disaggregated by sex and age. Can you speak to this seeming invisibility of older women and how we can address this with more and better data?

Thank you and thank you for inviting me here.

Thank you very. Yeah, I'm good here. Thank you for inviting me here on this panel today. So we are seeing growing attention global globally to demographic shifts and to the overall increase in the number of older people worldwide. However, while these broad trends are being discussed, as we've heard in the stats discussed today, far less attention is being given to the specific realities and inequalities experienced by older women or discussion about their rights.

This invisibility is reflected most clearly in data used to inform policy, allocate resources, and measure progress on gender equality and empowerment across the SDGs. When the governments adopted the SDGs, they committed to leaving no one behind. But achieving this commitment requires an understanding of who is benefiting from policies and progress and who is not. Individual data is what makes that possible. It helps governments identify inequalities, design effective policies, and track whether progress is reaching the people at every stage of their life.

We know, and we've heard today, that inequality does not stop at midlife and nor do contributions or rights. We've touched upon the exclusion of older women in the DHS surveys, which is important because these directly inform SDG reporting at national level on key areas such as health, sexual, reproductive rights, health and violence. Even when older women are included, they are grouped in broader categories such as 50 or 60 plus, which fail to capture the diversity of experiences in later life. Many women are also working longer in low income countries. Around one third of women aged 75 are still working to economically support themselves and their families.

But this data isn't being disaggregated to understand what impact that's having on their lives. When data collection ends at these age thresholds, the realities of older women disappear from national statistics. And when individuals disappear from data, they often disappear from policy and program interventions. That's why strengthening data is important. Gender data must be disaggregated by age.

We recommend, at minimum by 10 year cohorts across the life course, so we can understand how women's experiences evolve across the life course. We also need stronger investment in analysing data, linking it to resources and commitments on economic and social policies on issues such as unpaid care, economic security and participation, as well as access to services for older women. This data must then also be reported. If we take the gender snapshot, which is a key document produced every year on the SDGs, we rarely see any mention of older women. I think one, there was one mention a couple of years ago on poverty, but it's completely missing from any violence reporting data.

But improving data and statistics alone is not enough. We also need to capture the lived experiences behind those numbers and ensure that older women themselves are included in consultation and research so their voices shape solutions. Last week I was very fortunate to be joined by older women from Pakistan, Mongolia and Cameroon here. And it was their lived experiences and their practical solutions or ideas from themselves and their peers that really helped inform our discussions. So ultimately, if we're committed to achieving gender equality across the line life course, and truly committed to leaving no one behind in the SDGs, older women must be visible both in data and in the policies designed to achieve the SDGs.

Thank you.

Okay, I would like to thank all of you for illustrating the different ways in which older women are often invisible, discriminated against and left behind. And thank you also for sharing strong examples of policy choices that can stand in the way of this. We're going to have one more round of questions. I'm going to ask all of you to make your responses hopefully brief because we want to have a little bit of time to ask questions from the floor. So I'm going to start with you, Taya.

What other laws and policies stand out in the latest Women Business and Law report as strong examples of improving older women's lives?

All right, I'll try to keep it brief, although I could talk a lot on this, but virtually all the laws and policies we mentioned could somehow be attributed. But let me start at the end, maybe with pension, which is our last indicator. And I'll mention one other which is an assets. So starting with pensions, as we heard, women tend to live longer than men in some places, yet they often reach retirement with fewer financial resources.

Laws that ensure equal retirement ages for women and men are therefore fundamental because they allow women to work, contribute and accrue pension benefits for the same length of time. Yet gender gaps in statutory retirement ages persist in 61 out of the 190 economies, with measure with highest concentration in Europe and Central Asia, followed by the Middle east and North Africa. Equally important is how pension systems treat career interruptions related to caregiving. Today, 78 economies still still do not account for childcare related absences when calculating pension benefits. This effectively penalizes women twice, first for taking on unpaid care work and later through lower pensions and greater old age insecurity.

And another critical protection is equal survivor benefits, which help ensure that widows can maintain financial stability after the death of a spouse. A concrete example of a good practice comes from amman. Under his 2024 soldiers Social Protection Law, which is a reform, Oman introduced equal survivor benefits for spouses and ensured that periods spent out of the workforce for childcare are credited towards pension calculation. This is an important reform because it explicitly recognizes caregiving is economically valuable work and protects women from poverty and old age. However, despite this progress on the books, we see that implementation remains a major gap globally.

On average, barely half of the policies needed to operationalize laws related to old age security are in place. One striking example, 156 economies lack anonymized sex desegregated data on actual retirement ages and pension benefits received by women and men, making it very difficult to design policies that respond to women's real outcomes and track their impact. And just quickly, if I could mentioned the issue of assets ownership and control of assets. And we heard this story at the beginning in our fireside chat. Land and housing provide stability and resilience, particularly for widows or women whose paid work was interrupted earlier in life.

Yet gaps remain large. In 44 countries, women do not have equal inheritance rights with men, with the largest gap in Middle east and North Africa and sub Saharan Africa. Africa. In 22 countries, women still lack equal legal rights over immovable property. Even when laws are equal, the implementation is weak.

Globally, fewer than one third of the policies needed to support women's property ownership and registration are in place. And only 34 economies offer incentives such as reduced fees or joint titling programs to encourage women to formally register property. So even when women have this right in the law, their actual name is not on the land title because of some of these barriers to implementation. So just to conclude, these type of issues matter for women's long term financial health but laws and policies and pensions and assets are especially decisive for women who have already retired, shaping whether longer lives are lived with dignity, security and independence.

Thank you. It's just fascinating. Tanvi, what policy and program solutions have you seen from your experience with HelpAge that allow for more intersectional perspectives on aging and gender? Thank you. From our experience at HelpAge, one of the most important lessons is that age and gender rarely operate in isolation.

Older women's experiences are also shaped by factors such as income, disability, widowhood, geographic location, displacement or migration status as well as caregiving responsibilities. Recognising these overlapping forms of inequality is essential for policies to be effective, however. Going to the question A promising approach to addressing ageing and gender together is the development of gender responsive long term care and support systems. We previously worked and supported the Asian Development bank as part of their gender inclusive program initiatives, providing technical assistance to design long term care policies and a four year program aimed at preventing healthy aging for older women as well as reducing care giving burdens on women and girls. This has led to pilot projects in countries such as Vietnam, Indonesia and Mongolia.

However, I wanted to share a strong example which has resulted from this an intersectional approach has been taken in the Maldives Nation National Action Plan on Older People Goal 2 of this plan integrates gender and age into long term care strategy by recognising the role unpaid family caregivers provide mainly women through formal support programs, information and advocacy services as well as alignment to long term care standards and national policy. By addressing caregiving through a gendered lens, the plan acknowledges women's day disproportionate care responsibilities and ensures their contributions are better supported and recognised. And then secondly, another example more programmatic is gender and age responsive social protection programs which account for gender differences and reflect women's experiences. So we've supported programs through older people's associations, so that's groups of older people that come together socially and for advocacy purposes and to create spaces for older women to organise, raise concerns and advocate for their rights to social protection. In the first year of a multi country program funded by Irish Aid, we have seen access to social protection for older women in the project locations increase from 5% to 13%.

But we have also interestingly seen an increase in older women participating in advocacy initiatives. So we're especially targeting rural older women women who generally been marginalized from such activities. So this is another advocacy win. So we have also researched in these participating countries how to identify age and gender related barriers to design and delivery of social protection systems. So we've led direct engagement with governments and other stakeholders, CO leading this with older women themselves to advocate for more gender responsive and Asian disability inclusive mechanisms which act as barriers to the delivery of social protection systems, including pensions.

Finally, advancing older women's rights at international level is essential. We must support the work of the Intergovernmental Working Group on a legally binding instrument on the rights of older persons. And in doing so, we are really actively involving older women women to understand their experiences and ensure their rights are explicitly recognised, protected and promoted in whatever is drafted. So that's some examples of how we've done this.

Thank you. I can see some of those older women advocates are here today. All right, last exciting question for Doris. Co Impact's Gender Fund is aiming to raise and deploy 1 billion to accelerate progress towards gender equality. Can you tell all of us about this initiative and share some examples of CO impact's work that is already making a difference?

Thank you, Sarah. So yes, our Gender Fund reflects a simple belief, or is it CO impact, which is that lasting change and progress for women and girls happen when we change the systems, the structural inequalities, the barriers there, and not only when we fund individual projects. So our aim to raise 1 billion and deploy it over 10 years is really to use support partners who want to make those systemic changes to accelerate progress towards gender equality and women's leadership, particularly in the global majority countries. So let me give you two examples because I know we're short on time. In India, our partner Aman is helping to strengthen the public health system so women and children receive better maternal and neonatal care.

And as we said, as we shared in the report earlier, you know how the steps come about towards old age. Each of these are very significant to build on the overall pathway. And with CO IMPACT support, AMAN has unlocked more than 250 million from the government of India to scale services nationally in a systemic way which has the potential to reach 70 million women and children. Again, another example from India, Pradhan is working with women smallholder farmers. So this is an economic opportunities helping to unlock about 300 million in public funding for water resource development which will also increase the income of the tens of thousands of women farmers.

So we're already seeing traction in the work that our partners are undertaking even in the past three or four years. And my reflection is this, particularly with this panel and in this room, these examples aren't just success stories. They show what's possible when civil society, philanthropy, government, multilateral institutions all come to work together. And I think that's the particular hope and optimism that I see coming out of the work that we do.

Thank you.

Okay, we have such little time and we also have a very special guest. Here is the minister from Zimbabwe. I'm going to give you the floor, madam.

Thank you very much. It actually gives me great honor to join this very, very important side event which is talking about what I used to think 15 years ago didn't matter so much when I was 50. 15 years ago I didn't think who Today I'll be described as an elderly woman. And so aging is a process. We can't avoid it and it is important.

So I would just want to share with you what my country's Zimbabwe. I'm the Minister of Gender from Zimbabwe. And indeed it is crucial to strategize on enhancing the lives of our elderly women, recognizing the invaluable contributions as the backbone of our families, especially in our culture, the elderly women are the backbone of the families and communities they serve not only as caregivers and nurturers, but also as custodians of cultural heritage and wisdom, playing significant roles in family sustenance, tradition preservation and resilience during social and economic transition. And yet, despite their pivotal roles, older women often face disproportionate challenges including poverty, social exclusion and limited access to essential services. By prioritizing the needs and the rights of older women, what we are doing and talking about here, we not only honor their legacy, but also empower them to continue making transformative contributions to our societies.

We must develop targeted strategies to eliminate barriers to create opportunities. In Zimbabwe, we have made significant strides to support older women through targeted legislative measures and policies. Rights protection Our national constitution is enshrined with rights of older women, older persons mandating care for older people and services from families and the state. Then there is an anti discrimination legislation. The Older Persons act prohibits age discrimination in accessing public services.

Fostering and an inclusive environment. Then protection against violence. The Domestic Violence act protects older women from abuse. We continue to see more of our women 8 years old being raped by young people. And it is important we are working towards making sure that that doesn't happen.

So we have this Domestic Violence act which addresses critical concerns such as property grabbing and neglect. Then there is the economic stability. The labor act acknowledges the specific challenges older individuals face, advocating for long term financial stability through contributory social protection schemes. Then the issue of land. Equitable land access.

The Land Commission act provides joint land ownership, increasing secure rights for older women and widows to 30%. We know we all have land in Zimbabwe. And I'm married. I've been married for 45 years and I've made sure that the land I have is both in my husband's name and in my name. Just to make sure that nothing happens then.

Inclusive Development Goals, Zimbabwe's National Vision 2030 prioritizes the rights and needs of all the women in our national development plans. We do a lot of things. We are extending the retirement age also from 65 years to 70 years because we have realized that we are spending a lot of money looking after pensioners and yet actually they can be very, very productive after 65. And I say this because I'm 65.

And then our national Social Security scheme empowers those who have retired to earn a sustainable livelihood. Then this national social protection policy also we have a framework currently under review, aims to implement age inclusive and gender responsive measures for pensions and healthcare. We have learned a lot. There's a lot of lessons which we take back home from the presentation. I want to thank you and thank you for inviting me.

Thank you very much.

Thank you Sarah, for leading that conversation for us and thank you, honorable Minister, for your participation in this event. So today we have heard about the contributions of older women in paid work, unpaid care work facing financial insecurity and the cumulative effects of multiple discriminations across the course of our lives in older age. And we heard that what works for women works for economies. We heard that we can do better by older women. We can collect data that is sex and age disaggregated on women over the age of 49.

These are structural responses to structural problems. And lastly, we heard that we have hope for the future. We have the amplification of older women's voices here at CSW and in the work that we are doing towards a human rights convention at the United Nations. Thank you to the excellent speakers that we had on this panel for the work that we had together with the World Bank. Thank you to those of you who are online and for those of you who were here in the room to listen and give your attention to these important and inspiring words.

We are really grateful for that and for the organizers who all put this all together. I would like to remind you that access to the report is available online and also in the room here. And if you just haven't had enough conversation about older women's rights, in Conference room D at 3:15, we'll be having an event on older women's access to justice. So with that I leave you. I hope to see you all soon.

Thank you very much.