As South Africa prepares to take on the G20 Presidency in 2025, marking the first time the role is held by an African nation, the government has laid out a detailed roadmap to ensure inclusive participation across all sectors of society. The country’s Minister in the Presidency for Women, Youth and Persons with Disabilities, Honourable Sindisiwe Chikunga MP, outlined the department’s key plans, centred around inclusion, gender equality, and community development.
The Department of Women, Youth and Persons with Disabilities will chair the G20’s Empowerment of Women Working Group (EWWG), which is set to focus on three major themes: recognising the care economy, expanding women’s financial access and economic participation, and addressing gender-based violence.
A major priority is the care economy, where the department is advocating for care work to be treated as a public good rather than an unpaid private responsibility. The Minister noted that women remain the primary caregivers within families and communities, yet their labour often goes unrecognised and uncompensated.
Another area of focus is financial inclusion. Despite progress, many women, particularly those in rural areas or working informally, continue to face barriers to accessing capital, land, markets, and digital platforms. The department is calling for simpler, more accessible systems that meet women in their own contexts, rather than expecting them to navigate complex structures without the necessary infrastructure or documentation.
The third pillar is a commitment to tackling gender-based violence and femicide. The department is prioritising safety as a foundational requirement for women’s empowerment, pointing to the need for strengthened governance, laws, and programmes to protect women across all aspects of life.
Alongside the EWWG, South Africa has proposed the formation of a new G20 Disability Inclusion Working Group. This would formalise disability concerns within the G20 framework, ensuring sustained attention on the rights and needs of persons with disabilities beyond South Africa’s Presidency.
The department has also launched national consultations across provinces, including visits to Taung in North West and Mkhondo in Mpumalanga, to ensure local voices inform South Africa’s G20 contributions. These engagements feed into the upcoming National Women’s G20 Conference, scheduled ahead of the October EWWG Ministerial Meeting and the G20 Leaders’ Summit in November, to be hosted in Johannesburg.
South Africa’s G20 approach is shaped by the principle of Ubuntu, viewing shared progress and collective action as essential to solving global and local challenges. The department stressed the importance of fairness, inclusivity, and sustainability, insisting that the G20 should be accessible and relevant to ordinary citizens and not just world leaders and economists.
In terms of local initiatives, the department is pursuing a target of allocating 40% of public procurement to women. This includes efforts to promote women in sectors traditionally closed to them. A new Transformative Industrialists Accelerator programme is being rolled out to support women-led ventures in high-growth industries such as renewable energy, aerospace, agriculture, manufacturing, and digital economies. The programme will assist women from idea stage to market, including help with product development, funding, and industry connections.
Addressing exclusion faced by people with disabilities, the department also announced the launch of a Disability Inclusion Nerve Centre. Set to be a G20 legacy project, the centre will focus on data-driven planning, early childhood screening, inclusive education training, and tech-enabled accessibility improvements. It will also use artificial intelligence to enhance service delivery for people with disabilities.
The department made it clear that budgets and policies must reflect the lived experiences of the country’s most marginalised. It argued that for economic development to be meaningful, the voices of women, youth, and persons with disabilities must be at the centre of planning and resource allocation.
