KEYNOTE ADDRESS BY MINISTER SINDISIWE CHIKUNGA MINISTER IN THE PRESIDENCY FOR WOMEN, YOUTH AND PERSONS WITH DISABILITIES
G20 STRATEGIC BREAKFAST MEETING
Theme: Advancing Inclusive Growth for Women, Youth & Persons with Disabilities through South Africa’s 2025 G20 Presidency
The Venue, Morningside, Johannesburg
OPENING AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Programme Director, Ms Alwande Khumalo;
- Resident Representative of UN Women South Africa Multi-Country Office, Ms Alleta Miller;
- Deputy Director-General of the Department of Women, Youth and Persons with Disabilities, Ms Shoki Tshabalala;
- Deputy Minister in the Presidency for Women, Youth and Persons with Disabilities, Ms Mapaseka Steve Letsike;
- Facilitator for the dialogue on Public-Private Partnerships, Ms Bertha Dlamini;
- Ms Dineo Mmako, Chief Director in the DWYPD;
- Our esteemed guests from the public and private sector;
- Representatives of civil society and academia;
- Members of the media;
- Ladies and the few gentlemen in the room;
Good morning.
It is both an honour and a privilege to welcome you to this strategic breakfast meeting convened by the Department of Women, Youth and Persons with Disabilities under the theme: “Advancing Financial Inclusion and Economic Empowerment for Women Through Sustainable Partnerships”.
Today’s engagement is part of an ongoing broader national effort to ensure that South Africa’s Presidency of the G20 is not simply a moment on the international calendar — but a turning point in how we design, fund, and implement inclusive economic transformation.
This breakfast meeting, in particular, brings together key voices from across sectors because we know: it is only through meaningful partnership — across business, government, civil society, and multilateral institutions — that we can truly deliver the inclusive growth that our Presidency envisions.
WHY THIS MOMENT MATTERS — SOUTH AFRICA’S G20 PRESIDENCY
Colleagues,
South Africa’s Presidency of the G20 is historic — not just for us as a nation, but for the African continent. For the first time, the world’s leading forum for international economic cooperation is being chaired by an African country. With that comes both opportunity and responsibility.
Our Presidency is anchored on the theme: Solidarity, Equality, and Sustainability — not as abstract ideals, but as urgent priorities in a world where inequality is widening, multilateralism is strained, and the global economy remains deeply unequal.
At this moment in history, South Africa has a duty to make visible what has too often been overlooked. Our G20 platform must centre the lived realities of women, youth, and persons with disabilities — not as a footnote, but as a foundation for recovery and growth.
This is not only South Africa’s G20. It is Africa’s G20 — and it must be the People’s G20: shaped by those most affected by policy decisions, yet least represented in decision-making spaces.
In short, this is a call to elevate our Presidency from event-based diplomacy to outcome-driven action — and to shape a legacy that lives far beyond our leaders’ forum that will seat later this year.
INCLUSIVE GROWTH IS NOT A CHOICE — IT IS A NECESSITY
Colleagues,
Across the world — and certainly here at home — we’ve seen that economic growth alone does not guarantee shared prosperity. Growth that excludes the majority only deepens inequality. As the UN General Secretary said “high inequality sinks all boats”.
Women continue to hold up the care economy, support local markets, sustain families — and increasingly, shoulder the burden of survival in dangerous, unregulated sectors. Yet they remain structurally excluded from access to capital, land, procurement, and safe, dignified economic opportunity.
And when we speak of women, we must be specific. It is young women, rural women, informal traders, and women with disabilities who are most excluded — and most impacted by policy failure.
It is the woman in a mining town, trying to feed her children while navigating extractive economies that extract more than ore — they extract their dignity, safety, and voice.
It is the woman leading a risk unit in an insurance company, navigating boardrooms where gender still limits whose decisions matter. Globally, closing gender gaps in labour force participation could add up to $10 trillion to GDP. In South Africa, where more than 40% of women-headed households live below the upper-bound poverty line, inclusive growth is not just a development priority — it is an economic imperative.
But inclusion won’t happen on its own. It must be designed into how we regulate, finance, and govern. It must be visible in our budgets, data systems, workplace practices, and procurement decisions. And it must be driven by partnerships that understand that women are not a risk to be managed — they are the backbone of the economy we claim to build.
That is the work before us. And that is why we are here today.
STRATEGIC PRIORITIES OF THE EMPOWERMENT OF WOMEN WORKING GROUP
Colleagues,
As Chair of the G20 Empowerment of Women Working Group, South Africa has committed to advancing three priorities — grounded in national policy, aligned with the SDGs, and informed by women’s lived realities.
- The Care Economy Our first priority is recognising and investing in both paid and unpaid care work — a critical pillar of households, communities, and Yet it remains undervalued and overwhelmingly carried by women.
Women perform over 76% of all unpaid care work globally, according to the ILO. In South Africa, this limits access to education, employment, and leadership.
We are calling for:
- Investment in childcare and eldercare infrastructure;
- Decent pay and working conditions for care workers;
- Integration of care into economic
- Financial Inclusion of and for Women Our second focus is broadening women’s access to credit, procurement, capital, digital tools, and productive assets — especially for:
- Women in the informal economy;
- Rural women;
- Emerging entrepreneurs in key growth
The recently signed Public Procurement Act presents a major opportunity. With R1.5 trillion in projected public procurement over the next three years, we are working to ensure at least 40% reaches women-owned businesses — not as compliance, but as structural reform.
- Gender-Based Violence and Femicide (GBVF) There is no empowerment without safety. South Africa’s National Strategic Plan on GBVF and the National Council on GBVF Act provides us with a framework that encompasses prevention, protection, and accountability.
Programme Director, we are elevating GBVF as an economic issue. Violence undermines productivity, deepens inequality, and weakens trust in institutions. Our call to G20 partners is to integrate GBVF into economic policy, workplace safety standards, and national budgets.
These priorities reflect a simple truth: empowerment must be structural. They are not talking points — they are delivery platforms. And the work is already underway, with early recommendations from our technical meetings. The task now is implementation — at scale and with urgency.
Programme Director, in the interest of time, I now wish to take this moment to draw the attention of our private sector and development partners to two of the many legacy projects that we have conceptualised and are looking forward to implementing them through public- private-partnerships that will outlive our G20 presidency.
The first Legacy Project is the Disability Inclusion Initiative
Colleagues,
Part of our priority work in this working group revolves around ensuring that disability inclusion moves from being a compliance issue to the centre of everything we do. We aim to ensure that it is embedded into how we plan, budget, design infrastructure, and measure economic progress.
This is why South Africa’s G20 Presidency has placed disability inclusion at the centre of its legacy agenda — not as a side programme, but as a structural intervention through the Disability Inclusion Initiative (DII).
Through the DII, as part of our legacy projects, we are looking forward to working with you in setting up a Disability Inclusion Centre of Excellence, a capability that will provide us with consistent, evidence-based monitoring, evaluation and accountability on mainstreaming the rights of marginalised groups, with a particular focus on disability inclusion. The idea of a permanent observatory addresses one of the key gaps identified in the Beijing Declaration and subsequent movements for gender equality: the lack of reliable, disaggregated data and systematic tracking of progress. By serving as a central hub for collecting and analysing data, an observatory enables all of us to assess whether national and multilateral efforts and priorities are achieving their intended outcomes.
The Beijing Platform for Action emphasized that commitments alone are insufficient without mechanisms to measure implementation. To this end, an Observatory responds directly to this by offering an independent, analytical lens through which to evaluate policies, budgets, and programmes aimed at closing gender gaps. It strengthens the capacity of governments, civil society, and international organizations to understand the structural barriers women continue to face and to intervene more effectively. It also provides early warnings when progress stalls or reverses (as we have seen with the SDGs), ensuring that remedial action can be taken promptly.
At the national level, an Observatory will enable us to align with government accountability systems, reinforcing transparency and driving evidence-informed decision – making.
At a practical level, through this centre of excellence, we intend to work with captains of industry to adopt and support most of not all of the 450 special schools in order to address their technological, infrastructural and teacher development needs. At the very least, we intend to begin with 50 that will be turned into model disability inclusive schools that will set a clear example of what inclusive schooling is supposed to look like.
The Second Legacy project I wish to highlight has to do with setting up Emerging Industrialists and Supplier Development Accelerator Programs in the are of Critical Minerals.
Programme Director, as a department seized with women’s economic empowerment and their financial inclusion, we welcome the recent launch of South Africa’s Critical Minerals Strategy by the Minister of Minerals and Petroleum Resources, Honourable Gwede Mantashe.
The likes of gold, vanadium, palladium, rhodium, and rare earth elements as minerals have been designated as having moderate to high criticality – while copper, cobalt, lithium, graphite, nickel, titanium, phosphate, fluorspar, zirconium, uranium, and aluminium have been designated as having moderate criticality.
Therefore, despite the currently low growth prospects, it is clear that South Africa’s future is mostly contingent on the quality of our economic and industrial decision making, it is what we do today that will determine the next 30 years of our dispensation.
Our country’s geological heritage carries some one of the world’s most remarkable concentrations of mineral wealth, encompassing not just traditional precious metals but an increasingly crucial group of critical minerals essential to the global energy and technological transitions. We possess significant deposits of platinum group metals (PGMs), chromium, vanadium, manganese, and rare earth elements (REEs) – all of which are now classified as “critical minerals” by major economies. This unique endowment places ourcountry at the nexus of the world’s growing demand for minerals that power renewable energy, electric vehicles, advanced electronics, and defence technologies.
In 2024, the IMF estimated that our region is home to a conservative 30 percent of the world’s critical minerals. The Democratic Republic of Congo accounts for over 70 percent of global cobalt output and approximately half the world’s proven reserves. We remain the largest producer of manganese, while our neighbour, Zimbabwe, holds substantial and yet-to-be- explored lithium deposits.
However, over the years, although our region has carried weight in global mineral trade and related value chains, our focus on basic extraction and little value-added processing of the minerals has undermined our growth prospects and job creation potential.
By sticking to the lower value-added stages of extraction, we risk losing substantial benefits from processing. For example, raw bauxite fetches a modest $65 per ton, but when processed into aluminium it commands a hefty $2,335 per ton, in end-2023 prices.
Thus the only way to significantly boost profits, increase tax revenues, create higher-skilled jobs, and enhance positive technological spillovers is through a deliberate development of South Africa’s local processing industries. In addition to processing our own minerals, given our geographic positioning, we stand a greater chance of becoming a critical minerals processing and transportation hub of the region. This way, localisation and beneficiation can now move from rhetoric to practice.
Secondary processing and manufacturing represent the next frontier in value chain development and women’s economic empowerment. The establishment of battery material production facilities, catalyst manufacturing operations, and advanced materials development centres in places like Mpumalanga, Limpopo, North West, Gauteng, to name but a few, is what will transform this economy from a primary mineral supplier into a manufacturer of high-value components for both domestic and global industries. It is this level of deliberate transformation that will create thousands of skilled jobs and generate significant economic value through technology development and intellectual property creation.
And if the mission is to turn South Africa into the region’s processing, beneficiation and commercialisation plant, then we should be steadfast in directing significant public and private investments to the reconstruction of port, rail, energy, telecommunication and digital infrastructure.
Finally, while the Strategy presents a strong framework for industrial growth and global competitiveness, it is essential that its implementation deliberately incorporates gender-responsive and disability-inclusive approaches. We will be approaching Minister Mantashe with a range of emerging industrialists accelerator programmes aimed at ensuring the three constituencies we represent are not an afterthought.
IN CLOSING — LET THIS PRESIDENCY LEAVE A LEGACY
Colleagues,
As we close this engagement, let us be clear: this is not just another G20 meeting. It is part of a national effort to make inclusion and mainstreaming the norm, in how we lead, invest, and grow.
This Presidency marks 30 years of our democracy and 30 years since the Beijing Platform for Action. It is a moment to move from policy to progress — from well- meaning intentions to measurable change.
Let this be the Presidency that:
- Counted women’s work and invested in care;
- Put disability inclusion at the heart of economic justice;
- Linked procurement reform to real transformation;
- And made solidarity, equality, and sustainability more than just words.
But most importantly — let the impact of our work stretch far beyond the high-rise buildings of Sandton. Let it be felt in the daily lives of the informal trader in Lusikisiki, the baker in Ga-Rankuwa, the commercial farmer in Limpopo, and the young woman coder in eThekwini who simply needs one opportunity to thrive.
What we do now must outlive us.
“History will not judge us by the brilliance of our ideas, but by our ability to build systems that deliver for all.”
Thank you.