"More countries have understood that women's equality is a prerequisite for development"
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“Prerequisite” is the pressure point here: Kofi Annan isn’t praising gradual progress so much as stripping governments of an alibi. If women’s equality is a precondition for development, then “we’ll get to it later” stops being a cultural preference and starts looking like economic malpractice. The line works because it flips a familiar hierarchy. For decades, women’s rights were treated as a luxury item to be added after GDP rose, institutions stabilized, and wars cooled. Annan recodes equality as infrastructure: not a garnish on modernization, but the load-bearing beam.
The quiet steel in “more countries have understood” is diplomatic, but it’s also a ledger. Annan is naming a shift in global consensus without humiliating the laggards outright, a classic UN move: invite compliance by implying everyone serious is already on board. The subtext is competition and legitimacy. No state wants to be counted among the backward holdouts when “development” is the gold standard of international respectability, aid eligibility, and domestic pride.
Context matters: Annan spoke from the late-1990s/2000s UN moment shaped by Beijing’s 1995 platform, the rise of gender mainstreaming, and the Millennium Development Goals, where women’s education, health, and political participation were increasingly quantified as drivers of growth and stability. The sentence is strategic moral rhetoric dressed as pragmatism: it makes equality harder to argue against by tethering it to outcomes leaders already claim to want.
The quiet steel in “more countries have understood” is diplomatic, but it’s also a ledger. Annan is naming a shift in global consensus without humiliating the laggards outright, a classic UN move: invite compliance by implying everyone serious is already on board. The subtext is competition and legitimacy. No state wants to be counted among the backward holdouts when “development” is the gold standard of international respectability, aid eligibility, and domestic pride.
Context matters: Annan spoke from the late-1990s/2000s UN moment shaped by Beijing’s 1995 platform, the rise of gender mainstreaming, and the Millennium Development Goals, where women’s education, health, and political participation were increasingly quantified as drivers of growth and stability. The sentence is strategic moral rhetoric dressed as pragmatism: it makes equality harder to argue against by tethering it to outcomes leaders already claim to want.
Quote Details
| Topic | Equality |
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