By Elham Aziz

The SDGs were founded on a powerful promise: to leave no one behind. Yet, as Egypt moves through the final years of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, a more difficult question must be asked: who has the power to shape the development decisions that determine whose lives improve, whose voices are heard, and who continues to carry the hidden costs of development?

For Egypt, answering this question requires moving beyond conventional gender mainstreaming toward a more transformative, feminist approach to SDG implementation.

This does not mean creating a separate development agenda for women. Nor does it mean treating women solely as a vulnerable group. It means examining how decisions about economic development, climate action, environmental protection, public services, financing, employment, and technology affect women and men differently – and ensuring that women have a meaningful role in making those decisions.

Egypt’s foundation: A strong policy architecture

Egypt has already established important institutional foundations. The National Strategy for the Empowerment of Egyptian Women 2030, launched in 2017, is aligned with Egypt’s Vision 2030 and the SDGs and is organized around four pillars: political empowerment and leadership; economic empowerment; social empowerment; and protection.

The government has also developed a Gender-Responsive Sustainable Development Planning Manual to help integrate gender considerations into development planning. This framework includes 143 development interventions and 146 indicators for monitoring performance – a significant institutional achievement.

The UN Sustainable Development Cooperation Framework for Egypt 2023-2027 places women’s and girls’ empowerment among its five strategic outcomes and identifies gender equality and women’s empowerment as cross-cutting programming principles, alongside leaving no one behind, sustainability and resilience, and accountability.

The policy architecture is therefore increasingly in place. The next challenge is implementation: turning gender commitments into changes in power, resources, opportunities, and everyday lives.

Beyond counting women: Changing who has power

Gender equality is sometimes reduced to a question of numbers. How many women participate in a programme? How many receive training? How many are employed? How many sit on a committee?

These indicators matter, but they are not enough.

A feminist approach asks deeper questions:

• Who designed the programme?
• Whose knowledge was considered legitimate?
• Who controls the resources?
• Who makes the decisions?
• Who performs unpaid care work?
• Who benefits from environmental investments?
• Who bears the risks of pollution, climate change, unsafe work, inadequate services, or economic shocks?

And, perhaps most importantly: which women are being reached – and which women remain invisible?

Inviting women to a consultation is participation. Giving women meaningful influence over priorities, budgets, implementation, monitoring, and corrective action is decision-making power. The distinction is critical.

Women are not a homogeneous group

A feminist SDG framework must recognize that there is no single “Egyptian woman” experiencing development in the same way.

The priorities of a woman farmer in Upper Egypt differ considerably from those of a young woman entering the labor market in Cairo, a woman entrepreneur, a woman working in the informal economy, a woman with a disability, or an older woman providing unpaid care.

SDG implementation therefore needs more than sex-disaggregated data. Where possible, programmes should examine differences linked to geography, age, disability, income, employment, household responsibilities, and access to services.

Egypt’s National Strategy explicitly identifies the needs of women in rural areas, poorer households, female-headed households, older women, and women with disabilities. This principle should be extended to implementation of all SDGs.

Feminist principles strengthen – not compete with – the SDGs

There is sometimes a misconception that feminism is an additional social agenda competing with economic development, climate action, poverty reduction, or environmental protection. The opposite is true.

A feminist approach makes SDG implementation more effective and more sustainable.

Climate action: A clear opportunity

Women are not simply vulnerable victims of climate impacts. They are farmers, entrepreneurs, scientists, community organizers, environmental defenders, waste workers, educators, caregivers, and decision makers.

In many communities, women possess detailed knowledge about water, food, household consumption, waste, local ecosystems, and community health. Yet, this knowledge is frequently underrepresented in formal environmental decision making.

The question should not be: “How can we include women in this environmental project?”

It should be: “How would this project be different if women helped design it from the beginning?”

A feminist climate approach requires climate projects to assess:

• how climate risks affect women and men differently;
• who owns or controls productive resources;
• who receives climate finance;
• whether women-owned enterprises can access green finance;
• whether women participate in climate governance;
• how adaptation measures affect unpaid care work;
• whether green jobs are accessible to women; and
• whether climate technologies are affordable and accessible to women in vulnerable communities.

The care economy as economic infrastructure

Perhaps the most overlooked feminist principle is the recognition of unpaid care work.

A development model can report rising employment while ignoring who takes care of children, older people, people with disabilities, and households. It can promote entrepreneurship while assuming that women have unlimited time to work. It can build climate resilience without recognizing the additional unpaid labor created by water scarcity, food insecurity, extreme heat, or disrupted services.

This is why SDG implementation must treat the care economy as economic infrastructure.

Investments in childcare, eldercare, accessible transport, safe public spaces, water and sanitation, health services, and social protection are not merely social expenditures. They enable women to participate in education, employment, entrepreneurship, public life, and environmental action. They are investments in the economy.

Egypt’s National Strategy recognizes the importance of supporting working women through childcare and other services and calls for greater recognition of women’s unpaid work. The SDGs should make that principle operational.

Finance must follow the feminist principle

No feminist SDG agenda can succeed without feminist financing.

Gender-responsive budgeting should move beyond identifying whether women are mentioned in a project document. It should examine where money actually goes.

Public and development finance should be assessed against questions such as:

• How much investment directly benefits women?
• How much increases women’s economic independence?
• How much reduces unpaid care burdens?
• How much strengthens women’s leadership and decision making?
• How much reaches women in underserved communities?

These questions must be connected to measurable outcomes. Egypt’s existing gender-responsive planning framework provides a valuable institutional basis. The next stage is to strengthen implementation, transparency, tracking, and public reporting of gender-related expenditure and outcomes.

Data must reveal inequality – not hide it

SDG implementation depends on data. But averages can conceal inequality. A national average may suggest progress while masking major differences between women and men, urban and rural populations, income groups, age groups, or governorates.

Egypt therefore needs stronger use of sex-disaggregated and intersectional data across SDG implementation. Where possible, data should capture not only sex but also age, disability, geography, income level, employment status, and other relevant characteristics.

Moreover, data should not stop at measuring beneficiaries – they should measure outcomes.

Rather than reporting only the number of women trained, programmes should ask:

• Did their income increase?
• Did they obtain decent work?
• Did their workload decrease?
• Did their decision-making power increase?
• Did they gain access to finance?
• Did their exposure to environmental risks decline?
• Did they influence local policy?

This is the difference between counting women and measuring transformation.

Localizing feminist SDG implementation

The final test of the 2030 Agenda will not be found only in national strategies – it will be found in communities.

Egypt’s governorates have very different economic, social, environmental, and demographic realities. A feminist approach to localization should begin by asking women what sustainable development means in their communities.

Women-led civil society organizations (CSOs), community groups, researchers, youth organizations, and women entrepreneurs should be recognized as development partners and sources of knowledge – not simply as beneficiaries invited to validate decisions that have already been made.

Five shifts Egypt can make before 2030

With less than four years remaining before the 2030 deadline, Egypt can strengthen implementation through five practical shifts:

1. Make gender equality a requirement across all SDGs. Gender considerations should be embedded not only in SDG 5 (gender equality), but also in climate action, poverty reduction, health, education, decent work, sustainable cities, responsible consumption, chemicals and waste management, and environmental protection.
2. Move from consultation to co-decision. Women and women-led organizations should have meaningful roles in designing programmes, allocating resources, monitoring results, and evaluating impacts.
3. Connect budgets to outcomes. Gender-responsive budgeting should track actual expenditure and measurable changes in women’s lives.
4. Treat care as development infrastructure. Childcare, eldercare, accessible transport, water, sanitation, and social protection should be recognized as enablers of women’s economic and social participation.
5. Measure power. SDG indicators should capture changes in women’s control over income, assets, time, knowledge, technology, and decisions – not simply the number of women reached.

Egypt has the foundations. Now it needs transformation

Egypt does not need to start from zero.

It has a national women’s empowerment strategy, gender-responsive planning tools, institutional mechanisms, SDG coordination structures, and an established partnership between government, the UN, civil society, academia, and development partners.

Recent discussions between the government and the National Council for Women have emphasized women’s economic empowerment as a core element of development and employment. The current UN Cooperation Framework reinforces this direction, and Egypt’s 2025 UN Country Team Annual Results Report documented more than USD 191.5 million in programmatic delivery during 2025, with significant investments in women’s empowerment programming.

The primary challenge therefore is not one of policy formulation; it is one of implementation, accountability, financing, participation, and power.

The SDGs will succeed when women shape the future

Ten years after the adoption of the 2030 Agenda, the global community confronts a difficult reality: progress exists, but it is uneven and too slow.

The 2025 SDG reporting process emphasized that investing in women and girls is central to accelerating progress across the Goals. At the 2025 High-level Political Forum on Sustainable Development (HLPF), where SDG 5 underwent in-depth review, governments reaffirmed that gender equality and the empowerment and rights of women and girls are fundamental to achieving the SDGs.

For Egypt, the remaining years to 2030 should be used not simply to accelerate implementation, but to improve the way implementation happens.

Embedding feminist principles does not mean creating a parallel development agenda for women. It means making the existing agenda fairer, more accountable, more inclusive, and ultimately more effective. Because sustainable development is not sustainable if half of society is expected to adapt, care, produce, protect, and participate without an equal voice in determining the future.

Egypt has the policies. It has the institutions. It has the experience. The next step is to ensure that women are not only beneficiaries of sustainable development, but architects of it.

That is the true meaning of leaving no one behind – the shift from gender mainstreaming to feminist SDG implementation. It may be one of the most important shifts Egypt can make on the road to 2030.

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Elham Aziz is an Egyptian environmental expert with more than 38 years of experience in environmental protection, chemicals and waste management, pollution prevention, occupational safety and health, chemical security, and sustainable development. She is a former General Director for Hazardous Substances and Waste Management at Egypt’s Ministry of Environment, former Egyptian Focal Point for the Stockholm Convention, and former member of the Persistent Organic Pollutants Review Committee (POPRC).