At the Paris-held Generation Equality Forum (GEF), the UN Women-convened summit to accelerate gender equality investment, in addition to previously committing US$206 million for ending gender-based violence (US$44 million), financing women's rights organizations (US$60 million), and supporting sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR)—including comprehensive abortion care (US$102 million)—Sweden pledged to support the implementation of the Common Agenda for Comprehensive Abortion Care, established in April 2021 with the following priorities:
- Intersectional and inclusive movements from the local to the international;
- Responsive funding;
- Person-centered quality abortion care;
- More and greater coordination across and beyond the movement, supporting risk, creativity, advocacy, and accountability;
- Action addressing the opposition to abortion and SRHR; and
- Improved access to comprehensive abortion care in humanitarian settings.
Sweden, along with the other new signatories, also committed to creating platforms for continued dialogue and collaboration, including at least one more Global Safe Abortion Dialogue in the coming five years, and platforms to increase resources and support existing funding mechanisms, programs, and funds that provide direct, flexible, progressive, and sustainable funding to feminist organizations, movements, and activists, including those that are often hard to reach and/or who have been historically marginalized.
This increase of resources will be done through a collective funding commitment for the Action Coalition on Feminist Movements and Leadership. The Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida) will participate in the Global Alliance for Sustainable Feminist Movements and continue to contribute to joint learning and advocacy for improved methods to support feminist movements and youth-led organizations with flexible funding.
Sweden, as an organizer of the Stockholm Gender Equality Forum in 2018 and a supporting entity of the Tunis Forum 2019, has been actively engaged in the work leading up to the GEF. Sida has provided funding to UN Women for their work relating to Beijing +25 and GEF to ensure an inclusive process with participation from civil society at the center. In addition to being one of the co-leads for the Action Coalition on Economic Justice and Rights together with, among others, Spain, South Africa, Mexico, Germany, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), and PayPal, Sweden is also an Action Coalition Commitment Maker for the Action Coalitions on Bodily Autonomy and Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights, Gender-Based Violence, and Feminist Movements and Leadership, as well as the Compact on Women, Peace, and Security and Humanitarian Action (WPS-HA Compact).
Work in the Action Coalition on Economic Justice and Rights has revolved around four sub-areas: home and care work, a level playing field, access to resources such as land, ownership and financial services, and the macroeconomic perspective and gender budgeting.
Sweden's priorities have included "economic and social reforms such as individual taxation, childcare, care for the elderly, the labor market, and various welfare reforms," said Ulrika Grandin, Under-Secretary at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, "We have also put extra pressure on the feminist trade policy, which we think is well reflected in the action plan."
Sweden has a long-standing status as a global leader for gender equality. In 2014, Sweden became the first country in the world to adopt a feminist foreign policy, allowing it to use all its foreign policy tools (including development cooperation) to address gender equality globally.
News article – Omvärlden (in Swedish)