Follow-Up to the 2nd World Assembly on Ageing

Calls upon all States and the international community to cooperate, support and participate in the global efforts towards an age-inclusive implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and to mobilize all necessary resources and support in that regard, according to national plans and strategies, including through an integrated and multifaceted approach to improving the well-being of older persons, and in this regard encourages Member States to seize this opportunity to take into account issues of relevance to older persons in their efforts to promote the attainment of the Sustainable Development Goals;

Encourages Member States to address the situation of older persons in their voluntary national reviews presented at the high-level political forum on sustainable development;

Encourages Member States to intensify efforts towards identifying ageing as an opportunity, and recognizes that older persons make substantial contributions to sustainable development efforts, including through their active participation in society;

Invites Member States to continue to share their national experiences in developing and implementing policies and programmes aimed at strengthening the promotion and protection of the human rights of older persons, including within the framework of the Open-ended Working Group on Ageing;

Encourages Governments to actively address, through national, regional and international efforts, issues that affect older persons and to ensure that the social integration of older persons and the promotion and protection of their rights form an integral part of development policies at all levels;

Encourages Member States to adopt and implement non-discriminatory policies, legislation and regulations, to systematically review and amend these, where appropriate, if they discriminate against older persons, especially on the basis of age, and to take appropriate measures to prevent discrimination against older persons in, inter alia, employment, social protection and the provision of social, health-care and long-term care services;

Calls upon Member States to promote, in accordance with their national priorities, equitable and affordable access to sustainable basic physical and social infrastructure for all, without discrimination, including affordable serviced land, housing, modern and renewable energy, safe drinking water and sanitation, safe, nutritious and adequate food, waste disposal, sustainable mobility, health-care services and family planning, education, culture and information and communications technologies, and to ensure that these services are responsive to the rights and needs of older persons, while recognizing that planning for and providing opportunities for making cities inclusive of older persons’ economic and social participation is an important dimension of the construction of sustainable cities;

Encourages Member States to take into account the multidimensional nature of the vulnerability of older persons to poverty and economic insecurity, including through the promotion of good health, care and well-being, in their implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals at the national level;

Encourages Governments to pay greater attention to building capacity to eradicate poverty among older persons, in particular older women and older persons with disabilities, by mainstreaming ageing issues into poverty eradication measures, women’s empowerment strategies and national development plans, and to include both ageing-specific policies and ageing-mainstreaming efforts in their national strategies;

Encourages Member States to consider expanding, in accordance with domestic legislation and policies, the reach of sustainable pension schemes, including but not limited to strategies such as social pensions, and increasing their benefits, with a view to ensuring income security in old age;

Also encourages Member States to develop and implement long-term care strategies, as well as to conduct research on good practices of care strategies, recognizing and supporting both paid and unpaid care work for the benefit of older persons, and to further promote long-term care as a positive social and economic investment and a source of employment expansion;

Further encourages Member States to promote terms and conditions of care work guided by International Labour Organization standards for all care workers, including but not limited to migrants, and to adopt measures to tackle the gender and age stereotypes for care work;

Encourages Member States to strengthen their efforts to develop national capacities to address their national implementation priorities identified during the review and appraisal of the Madrid Plan of Action by considering and devising strategies that take into account the entirety of the human life course and foster intergenerational solidarity, the strengthening of institutional mechanisms, research, data collection and analysis and the training of necessary personnel in the field of ageing;

Recommends that Member States increase efforts to raise awareness of the Madrid Plan of Action and identify key priority areas for its implementation, including empowering older persons and promoting their rights, bearing in mind the crucial importance of intergenerational family interdependence, solidarity and reciprocity for social development, raising awareness of ageing issues and building national capacities, as well as promoting and supporting initiatives to advance a positive public image of older persons and their multiple contributions to their families, communities and societies and working with the regional commissions, as needed, and enlisting the help of the Department of Global Communications of the Secretariat in seeking increased attention for ageing issues;

Encourages Governments that have not done so to designate focal points for handling the follow-up of national plans of action on ageing, and also encourages Governments to strengthen existing networks of national focal points on ageing;

Invites Governments to conduct their ageing-related policies through inclusive and participatory consultations with relevant stakeholders and social development partners, in the interest of developing effective policies that create national policy ownership and consensus-building;

Recommends that Governments be inclusive in involving older persons and their organizations in the formulation, implementation and monitoring of policies and programmes that affect them, including through simple consultative mechanisms to co-research or co-design such policies and programmes with or by older persons and to take due account of involving those who experience multiple and intersecting forms of discrimination and are particularly vulnerable to high incidences of poverty and social exclusion;

Recommends that Member States enhance their capacity to more effectively collect age-disaggregated data, statistics and qualitative information, disaggregated also, when necessary, by other relevant factors, including sex and disability, in order to improve assessment of the situation of older persons, recognizes that the data revolution presents new opportunities and challenges for the use of new data to help with the measurement of progress in the implementation of the 2030 Agenda, in particular its aspects of relevance to older persons, and to ensure that no one is left behind, and in this regard recalls the establishment by the Statistical Commission of the Titchfield Group on Ageing-Related Statistics and Age-Disaggregated Data and the consideration of its work;

Encourages States parties to existing international human rights instruments, where appropriate, to address the situation of older persons more explicitly in their reports, and encourages treaty body monitoring mechanisms and special procedure mandate holders to pay due regard to the situation of older persons in their dialogue with Member States, particularly in their concluding observations and reports, respectively;

Encourages Member States to adopt social policies that promote the development of community services for older persons, taking into account the psychological and physical aspects of ageing and the special needs of older women and older persons with disabilities;

Also encourages Member States to ensure that older persons have access to information about their rights so as to enable them to participate fully and justly in their societies and to claim full enjoyment of all human rights;

Calls upon Member States to develop their national capacity for monitoring and enforcing the rights of older persons, in consultation with all sectors of society, including organizations of older persons, through, inter alia, national institutions for the promotion and protection of human rights, where applicable;

Also calls upon Member States to strengthen and incorporate a gender and disability perspective into all policy actions on ageing, as well as to address and eliminate discrimination on the basis of age, sex or disability, and recommends that Member States engage with all sectors of society, in particular with relevant organizations with an interest in the matter, including organizations of older persons, women and persons with disabilities, in changing negative stereotypes about older persons, in particular older women and older persons with disabilities, and promote positive narratives of all older persons;

Urges Member States to develop, implement and evaluate policies and programmes that promote healthy and active ageing and the highest attainable standard of health and well-being for older persons and to develop health care for older persons as part of primary care in the existing health systems;

Encourages Member States to ensure that the principle of non-discrimination on the basis of age is incorporated and upheld in health and other policies and programmes and that the implementation of such policies and programmes is regularly monitored;

Urges Member States to strengthen intersectoral policy frameworks and institutional mechanisms, as appropriate, for the integrated management of the prevention and control of non-communicable diseases, including health promotion, health-care services and social welfare services, in order to address the needs of older persons;

Calls upon Member States and other stakeholders to prevent, monitor and address the disproportionate effects of the pandemic on older persons, including the particular risks that they face in accessing social protection and health services, and to ensure that health-care decisions affecting older persons respect their dignity and promote and protect their human rights, including the right to the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health;

Encourages Member States to provide services and support to older persons, including grandparents, who have assumed responsibility for children who were abandoned or whose parents are deceased, have migrated, have been displaced, including in the context of humanitarian emergencies, or are otherwise unable to care for their dependants;

Calls upon Member States to address the issue of the well-being of and adequate health-care services for older persons, as well as any cases of neglect, abuse and violence against older persons, in particular older women, by designing and implementing more effective prevention strategies and stronger laws and by developing coherent and comprehensive policy frameworks to address these problems and their underlying factors;

Urges Member States to increase the resilience of older persons and ensure that they are able to achieve and maintain financial security during emergencies, through, inter alia, addressing the digital gap that currently affects many older persons and protecting them from violence and abuse in digital contexts; strengthening legal and social protection and adopting adequate employment measures; providing better care and support services, promoting long-term care and support at home, in the community and in institutional settings, with a view to ensuring their empowerment, as well as their autonomy and independence; adopting a people-centred, gender-sensitive comprehensive and integrated approach, with full respect for human rights, to health care to improve the well-being of older persons, including mental health care, non-communicable disease management and adult immunization efforts; and developing national vaccination plans that give priority to older persons and are guided by principles of equality and social justice;

Calls upon Member States to take concrete measures, in accordance with national circumstances and, as appropriate, international humanitarian law, to further protect and assist older persons in emergency situations, and invites all States to promote a culture of protection, taking into account the particular needs of older persons, in accordance with the Madrid Plan of Action and the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015–2030¹⁹ by, inter alia, including older persons in disaster risk reduction and national and local emergency planning and response frameworks, collecting and using data disaggregated by age, sex and disability for policy design and implementation, as well as carrying out risk and vulnerabilities analyses of older women in humanitarian emergencies with a view to minimizing the risk to older women of all forms of violence in such emergencies;

Encourages Member States to integrate lessons learned from the pandemic with regard to older persons in order to combat ageism, protect the human rights of older persons and strengthen existing policies and laws to address all forms of discrimination in all areas of their life, as well as to take concrete measures that integrate age- and gender-responsive preparedness plans into relevant policy areas at the national and international levels and ensure that older persons and their representatives are consulted in planning and decision-making processes that affect them, on an equal basis with others, in order to address their specific needs;

Encourages Member States to establish or to strengthen strategic approaches and policy options in relation to the physical and mental health of older persons in the light of new and emerging disease patterns, notably non-communicable diseases, as well as in relation to increased life expectancy, with particular attention to promoting good health and addressing health needs across a care continuum, including prevention, detection and diagnosis, management and rehabilitation, treatment and palliative care, with the aim of achieving comprehensive health-care coverage for older persons;

Encourages the international community, including international and bilateral donors, to enhance international cooperation to support national efforts to eradicate poverty, in keeping with internationally agreed goals, in order to achieve sustainable and adequate social and economic support for older persons, while bearing in mind that countries have the primary responsibility for their own economic and social development;

Also encourages the international community to support national efforts to forge stronger partnerships with civil society, including organizations of older persons, academia, research foundations, faith-based organizations, community-based organizations, including caregivers, and the private sector, in an effort to help to build capacity on ageing issues;

Encourages the international community and the relevant agencies of the United Nations system, within their respective mandates, to support national efforts to provide funding for research and data-collection initiatives on ageing, as appropriate, in order to better understand the challenges and opportunities presented by population ageing and to provide policymakers with more accurate and more specific information with regard to a gender perspective on ageing, as well as to include indicators that provide an evidence base for the equitable delivery and effective monitoring of the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals, the New Urban Agenda²⁰ and national policymaking, as well as to gain a better understanding of how to promote ageing in a way that is not adversely affected by rapid urbanization and gentrification;

Requests the focal point on ageing of the United Nations system, the Programme on Ageing of the Department of Economic and Social Affairs of the Secretariat, to continue to enhance its collaboration with the focal points of the regional commissions, funds and programmes, and recommends that Member States reaffirm the roles of focal points within the United Nations system, increase technical cooperation efforts, consider expanding the role of the regional commissions on ageing issues and continue to provide resources for those efforts, facilitate the coordination of national and international non-governmental organizations on ageing and enhance cooperation with all relevant stakeholders, to promote ageing issues and develop partnerships in this regard;

Requests the United Nations system to strengthen its capacity to support, in an efficient and coordinated manner, national implementation of the Madrid Plan of Action, where appropriate;

Requests relevant entities of the United Nations system, including the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women (UN-Women), to ensure that the situation of older women is mainstreamed and incorporated across their work and to support, in accordance with their respective mandates, the implementation of the 2030 Agenda, in particular its aspects of relevance to older persons, including gender equality and the empowerment of all women and girls through, inter alia, the elimination of all forms of discrimination and violence against women;

Invites relevant entities of the United Nations system, including UN-Women, the United Nations Development Programme, the United Nations Population Fund, the International Labour Organization, the United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat), the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, the World Food Programme, the International Fund for Agricultural Development, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and the World Health Organization, among others, as well as the International Organization for Migration, to include in reports to their respective governing bodies relevant information on efforts made by Member States and the international community on issues of relevance to older persons, including their social inclusion;

Encourages Member States to continue to contribute to the work of the Open-ended Working Group on Ageing, in particular by presenting measures to enhance the promotion and protection of the human rights and dignity of older persons, such as best practices, lessons learned and possible content for a multilateral legal instrument, as appropriate, in order to enable it to fulfil its existing mandate of strengthening the protection of the human rights of older persons by considering the existing international framework of the human rights of older persons and identifying possible gaps and how best to address them, including by considering, as appropriate, the feasibility of further instruments and measures, and by considering adopting at each session intergovernmentally negotiated recommendations to be presented for consideration by the General Assembly;

Requests the Secretary-General to provide all necessary support to the Open-ended Working Group on Ageing for the organization of its twelfth session, of four days, in April 2022, with the provision of conference services, including interpretation services, and to include the annual sessions of the Working Group in the Organization’s calendar of conferences and meetings;

Invites the Independent Expert to address and engage in an interactive dialogue with the General Assembly at its seventy-seventh session under the agenda item entitled “Social development”;

Requests the Secretary-General to submit to the General Assembly at its seventy-seventh session a report on the implementation of the present resolution.