A/HRC/53/39 live in sub-Saharan Africa.74 The privatization of reproductive health services and products renders them unaffordable for low-income women and girls, which perpetuates intergenerational poverty.75 In addition, as noted above, the criminalization of women and girls seeking contraceptive goods and services or abortion care disproportionately affects those without the means to travel to other jurisdictions to access those services. 76 The practice of coerced sterilization, particularly of ethnic minority and Indigenous women, including those deprived of their liberty, as well as of women with disabilities, is also an outcome of the intersectional discrimination and violence experienced by women and girls living in poverty. The gender inequalities and poverty being exacerbated as a result of conflict, occupation, climate change and disasters have increased school dropout, sexual violence and exploitation, forced and child marriage, early and unwanted pregnancies and trafficking in women and girls.77 43. Poverty and gender-based violence, including sexual violence and denials of bodily autonomy, therefore interact in a vicious, mutually reinforcing cycle. Women and girls facing sexual harassment at work, violence at home or violence on the streets are unable to participate on an equal basis in the labour market, and this in turn means that they are also discriminated against in connection with contributory social security benefits and are more likely to experience poverty, violence and homelessness in old age.78 When women and girls cannot access sexual and reproductive health education, information and goods and services, and family planning services, including abortion, gender-based inequalities and poverty are further entrenched and may be transmitted to future generations. 79 Right to social protection 44. The right to social protection, guaranteed in article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and article 9 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights as well as in several ILO conventions, plays a crucial role in combating poverty by enabling all people to access an adequate standard of living that includes the rights to food and nutrition, housing, water and sanitation, and energy, as well as health and education. The right to social protection incorporates the right to “access and maintain benefits, whether in cash or in kind, without discrimination in order to secure protection” from a lack of workrelated income, unaffordable health care, and insufficient family support. 80 Target 5.4 of the Sustainable Development Goals, and the Global Alliance for Care, call upon all countries to recognize, value, reduce and redistribute unpaid care and domestic work through the provision of public services and social protection, and through redistributive policies, as key mechanisms to achieve gender equality. ILO conventions and recommendations on maternity protection and workers with family responsibilities, and the ILO Domestic Workers Convention, 2011 (No. 189), are useful advancements. Globally, however, there are enormous gaps in social protection, and an estimated 4.1 billion people worldwide are not covered by any benefits, the majority of those who are unprotected being older women in the African region.81 45. While there have been improvements in social protection over recent decades and the COVID-19 crisis demonstrated that it was possible in many countries to rapidly implement benefits schemes, most social security systems continue to be gender-insensitive. The lack of gender-responsiveness in most social protection schemes is apparent in their exclusion of sexual and reproductive health services and conditions, failure to provide for leave and benefits for domestic violence-related harms, absence of support for women and girls in their roles as carers or as care-receivers throughout their life cycle, and making benefits contingent 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 GE.23-06173 World Family Planning 2022: Meeting the Changing Needs for Family Planning – Contraceptive Use by Age and Method (United Nations publication, 2022). Open Space Association Deep Poverty Network Turkey. Views expressed during consultations. Submissions from the Bureau des Avocats Internationaux and the World Muslim Congress. Submission from Legal Clinic of University of Murcia, with Cepaim. Submissions from the World Muslim Congress and the Bureau des Avocats Internationaux. Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, general comment No. 19 (2008). ILO, World Social Protection Report 2020–2022: Social Protection at the Crossroads – in Pursuit of a Better Future (2021). 13