Le coronavirus vient accroître les souffrances de la région arabe. Une vision provisoire de ce changement peut être obtenue en posant quelques questions: Quelles sont les conséquences d'un ralentissement économique mondial? En quoi l'impact d'une pandémie différera-t-il d'un pays à l'autre ou d'une communauté à l'autre? Comment cet impact se reflétera-t-il dans la région arabe en particulier? Qu'en est-il des pays qui traversaient déjà une crise économique comme le Liban? Qu'en est-il des millions de réfugiés qui vivent dans des camps dans plusieurs pays arabes? Comment l'isolement affecte-t-il les travailleurs journaliers? Comment la propagation du virus affecte-t-elle la sécurité du travail dans la région arabe avec les taux de chômage des jeunes les plus élevés au monde? Quel est l'impact de la ségrégation sur les femmes et les enfants victimes de violence domestique? Et les sans-abri? Qu'en est-il des groupes qui n'ont pas de soins de santé gratuits, en particulier dans les pays où le secteur de la santé a été privatisé et où les compagnies d'assurance ont remplacé le système de santé? Quel est le sort de ceux qui vivent sous occupation, comme en Palestine? Ou qui vivent dans des zones de guerre comme la République arabe syrienne, la Libye et le Yémen? Comment l'épidémie affecte-t-elle les systèmes éducatifs et quelles sont les conséquences de la transformation soudaine de l'enseignement à distance? Comment tout ce qui précède affecte-t-il les inégalités dans les sociétés? Les œuvres de bienfaisance ou les dons des riches atténuent-ils l'inégalité? Comment l'épidémie affecte-t-elle la compréhension de la signification du travail (en particulier des activités principales), de la production et de la consommation dans nos sociétés? Quel est l’impact négatif des sanctions unilatérales sur le peuple syrien?
ICSFT regrette les attitudes des États-Unis d'Amérique contre l'Organisation Mondiale de la Santé (OMS), les déclarations racistes et les accusations sans preuves contre la Chine.
Recommandations
Mettre l'accent sur la solidarité de la communauté internationale pour maintenir l'ordre mondial et adhérer aux principes de la Charte des Nations Unies et respecter les règles du droit international et les résolutions des Nations Unies.
Évitez tous les discours racistes et les accusations aléatoires.
Éliminer le phénomène des inégalités économiques dans la région arabe après COVID- 19.
Reconsidérer les politiques publiques et la gestion de la crise par l'État (marché du travail, système de santé, logement, éducation).
Reconsidérer les principes de citoyenneté et de droits de l'homme en relation avec les groupes marginalisés (femmes, réfugiés, personnes ayant des besoins spéciaux et apatrides).
Renforcer la coopération internationale pour réduire les pertes humanitaires, économiques et sociales conformément aux directives des Nations Unies.
Coordonner les réponses mondiales aux niveaux humanitaire, social et économique.
Mettre en place un mécanisme de suivi pour garantir la transparence de la réalisation des objectifs de développement durable loin du pillage des richesses des populations, de la propagation de la corruption et de la saisie de biens et d'équipements publics.
Former UN Secretary General in 2016 stated that “Families are on the frontlines of our global efforts to realize the bold and inclusive 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development”. Given these realities, understanding how families contribute to social progress is key to finding the most effective route to achieving the SDGs. When the journey to define the ‘2030 Sustainable Development Agenda’ began in 2012, most members of the High-Level Panel of advisers appointed by the UN Secretary General agreed that, much more than devoting one of the goals to the family, the reality was that development is very much linked to the way families fulfil their social role, especially regarding poverty, health, education, equality and peace.
Despite this, global data on families is lacking, prompting the UN Secretary General in 2014 to call on governments and relevant stakeholders to “support data collection and research on family issues and the impact of public policy on families and invest in family-oriented policy and programme design, implementation and evaluation.”
SDGs and Families
This is why the International Federation for Family Development promoted, together with UNICEF and several experts from all over the world, a project to analyze how family policies can contribute to the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals. The aim was to reflect pragmatic processes and procedures to assess:
-how family policies work to affect different social progress goals (as defined in the SDGs) in different parts of the world;
-how the actions of non-government actors working in support of families contribute to the issue;
-and how family attributes at household or national level impact on the effectiveness of the previously identified family interventions.
The need for such a research met with the lack of global data on family issues.
However, many conclusions could be drawn from it. The available evidence shows indeed that family environments can be the cause of and the solution to several negative social outcomes, sometimes even both. In a report on the implementation of the objectives of the International Year of the Family and its follow-up processes, the UN Secretary General explained that “families are active stakeholders in and beneficiaries of the implementation of the 2030 Agenda. [...] Meeting the needs of families and empowering them to fulfil their numerous functions are key to the achievement of many Sustainable Development Goals” (A/75/61–E/2020/4).
Families, for instance, are where most victims of violence usually find support.
However, violence also often originates in intimate places (SDG 16). Intimate-partner violence is one of the most common forms of violence against women and 60-90% of children experience violent discipline in most of the countries were data are available
(UNICEF 2018). Violence has been proven to largely be fostered by poverty. Some family types are more likely to experience poverty or extreme poverty (SDG 1);
female-headed households or migrant families are usually among the poorest in developing countries as are single-parent families or families in which parents are low educated in developed countries, to name only a few types of them.
Both violence and poverty highlight the cross-cutting quality of some of the SDGs.
There is no fighting against gender inequalities for instance, while domestic violence is still being perpetrated; gender inequality in the public sphere is both the cause and the result of the inequality in the private sphere. Many SDGs are actually intertwined, and families feature as their common thread.
Poor guidance of families also explains the problems the households are facing.
Education for example is not bound to schools; it actually starts in the family.
“Families are a key point for promoting school attendance and learning” (UNICEF, 2018). On the same level, the lifestyle choices a family makes will have impacts on health outcomes; their diet and physical activities will have consequences on their need to access health infrastructures.
SDGs and families are hence linked to each other; this calls for a deeper awareness of the importance to implement family-focused policies.
The need for family-focused policies
National public policies reflect the importance of the family. As stated in the above- mentioned UN Secretary General’s Report, fostering and supporting stable families is a priority for many countries. Investments in family-oriented policies and programmes contribute to poverty reduction and investment in human capital. Families are also widely regarded as enablers of social protection; ensuring intergenerational solidarity and investing in families as the natural environment for children is therefore often seen as the best social protection strategy.
Many of these policies have a positive impact on families. Well-designed family- focused policies can positively impact SDGs, albeit context might influence the degree of efficiency of family-focused policies. This underpins the necessity of recollecting further evidence on scalability and transfer of those policies.
The analysis from the UNICEF 2018 report shows that public policies targeted to address the problems families face usually have the positive desired effects. For instance, the implementation of and access to social protection mechanisms, allowances and cash transfers actually reduce poverty rates in poor populations (SDG 1). Similarly, policies aiming at helping parents find a paid job showed to, apart from enhancing the whole family’s economic wellbeing, positively affect young peoples’
attitudes, behaviours and outcomes in the labour market (SDGs 8 and 16).
A well-functioning family is key to various problems that might be encountered outside the household. Gender equality is typically one of them. Gender equality issues often take root in broader and different situations; “gender equality in the public sphere can never be achieved unless unpaid domestic work and care work is shared more equally in the private sphere” (UNICEF 2018). Parental leaves can be quite a powerful leverage to implement gender equality policies. It has been observed that while longer parental leaves granted to mothers tended to delay their return to work, and thus jeopardize long-term advancement of their career, paternity leave, as non-transferable to mothers, showed promising results to enhance gender equality (SDG 5).
Public policies need to foster a well-suited environment for the stable development of families, not only by offering a positive help but also by setting an efficient prevention system. Two SDGs have been found to most benefit from this kind of policies. SDG 3 aims at ensuring healthy lives and promoting well-being. Programs implementing family-focused sessions and therapies showed to have positive health outcomes through developing healthy lifestyle patterns and raising awareness to at-risk behaviours. Family interventions for cardiovascular disease tend to increase patients and their families’ knowledge about the disease, including its symptoms, treatment and factors contributing to its evolution.
SDG 16 focuses on ending violence. Although the report calls for a better measurement of interpersonal violence, investigations have pointed out the necessity to focus on preconditions that facilitate interpersonal violence, as a prevention tool to reduce violent behaviours, before they even develop.
From a more local or regional perspective, not only global or national policies are needed. Families need resilient environments to flourish. Most of the families live in communities within large urban settings. We have seen a rapid growth of cities areas and it is well known that urbanization brings challenges for all family members such as children, parents, youth, persons with disabilities and older persons. Innovative solutions are needed if SDG 11 has to be achieved.
Our Federation has been actively trying to contribute to that mission. It promoted and prepared the Venice declaration to build a network of inclusive cities as the result of the
‘Inclusive Cities for Sustainable Families’ project, contributing to SDG 11 and including families by being responsive to their needs. It is therefore clear that SDGs are best addressed through well-designed family-focused policies and move forward in the realization of the 2030 Agenda.
Cross-cutting effects of family-focused policies meeting the SDGs
Many of the studied policies around the world, across the SDGs, have found to have spill over effects, due to the fact that the problems addressed by the SDGs take root
from different contexts and environments. This means that when policies are addressing a specific situation, other situations are likely to be impacted. When the policy is poorly designed, it might have undesired effects. For instance, efforts to address employment outcomes for women will be sub-optimal whilst gender inequality in leave entitlements continue to exist. However, those cross-cutting repercussions are usually positively evaluated, when the policies have been designed for a specific purpose in the first place.
For instance, cash benefits consistently reduce poverty, and decrease deprivation, and both conditional and sometimes unconditional versions of these benefits can encourage children’s access to schools, healthcare, and improve both social (through increment of social housing programs) and health outcomes. In turn, family-focused health policies proved to have a positive impact on healthy eating patterns, which is in keeping with SDG2; family-focused information programs are usually the way to implement this kind of policy.
In fact, family-focused education interventions have the broadest spillover effects among all family-focused policies. For instance, it is long known that high educated children are less likely to feature among poor populations (SDG 1). Well-designed education-focused policies also have positive impacts on child development and on health outcomes in general (SDG 3). Integrated family support helps externalize behaviours which have positive consequences on social behaviours (SDG 16). While addressing specifically this goal, family home visits have proven to be most effective, enabling more children to access health checks and improving child development activities.
As a rule, fostering family stability has numerous positive consequences, among which reduction of poverty risks (SDG 1) and child development (SDG3), which in turn contributes to young girls’ empowerment (SDG 5). One study in Austria even linked longer parental leave to increased fertility rates (SDG 3). Spillover effects are indeed various and call for greater attention from policy makers, in order to achieve SDGs through family-focused interventions.
Conclusion
The importance of families and family policies in meeting the SDGs has to be emphasized, in considering both their social role for development and their need to be helped for it. State public policies must foster well-suited environments for families to be able to fully develop their potential. The multiplicity of positive spillover effects of family-focused policies bolsters the ability of families to meet the SDGs. It also underpins the need to optimize efforts in implementing these policies and to consider the order of their intervention. The lack of global data on these issues calls for further studies on family-focused policy issues and for greater collaboration of both national and international organizations.