As G20 leaders gather to negotiate the future of global growth, security and cooperation, the world outside the summit walls is speaking a language they can no longer ignore, and that language has taken on a colour: purple. The Purple Hearts Movement is a political symbol that has spread across digital platforms and even public spaces in the form of protests, drawing attention to one of the most persistent governance failures of our time: gender-based violence against women.
The symbolism is deceptively simple: purple hearts shared online, purple profile images, and purple clothing worn at vigils and protests. Yet beneath that simplicity lies a message tailored for policymakers who often perceive gender issues as secondary to economic priorities. The message is this: development is not neutral. Economies do not grow on violence, and countries cannot claim stability while half their population lives with systemic risk.
The G20, an organisation that prides itself on shaping global resilience, is confronted with an uncomfortable truth. Gender-based violence is no longer a “social” issue unfolding at the community level. It is a macro-risk that undermines productivity, inflates public health burdens, fuels instability, weakens institutions and corrodes public trust. If the G20 continues to overlook it, the costs will escalate, not only for individual nations but also for the very global system the forum was designed to safeguard.
The G20 was never designed to be a social justice forum. Its architecture is rooted in economic stewardship, crisis management and global coordination during periods of instability. Yet that mandate is precisely why the conversation around gender-based violence belongs within its walls. For decades, GBV has been treated as an unfortunate social phenomenon, tragic yet somehow peripheral to the concerns of economic governance. This view has outlived its usefulness. Today, the evidence is unambiguous: societies that fail to protect women undermine their own economic potential. Violence diminishes productivity, suppresses labour participation, inflates healthcare costs, weakens institutions, and corrodes the trust necessary for cohesive political communities. The cost of violence is measured in thousands of dollars, lost opportunities, and destabilised households.
When the world’s largest economies sit together to shape global priorities, the question therefore is not whether gender-based violence is “relevant” to them. The question is how long they can continue constructing economic strategies that pretend the erosion of half the world’s human capital is incidental. The Purple Movement has made that pretence harder to maintain. It has reframed the nature of the crisis by shifting the narrative from empathy to accountability. This is about recognising that violence against women is an indicator of governance failure and a barrier to sustainable development. In this framing, the purple symbol does not represent sympathy but rather a demand for policy coherence.
In recent months the symbol has gained particular force in Southern Africa, where rising femicide rates and high-profile cases have ignited public frustration. South African women mobilised around purple as part of a demand that femicide be declared a national crisis. The sentiment travelled quickly across borders. In Namibia, which records thousands of GBV cases annually, the purple emblem spoke to a familiar reality: that strong legal frameworks on paper contrasted with persistent failures of enforcement; police systems struggling to keep pace with the volume of cases; overburdened courts and inconsistent support for survivors; and communities in which fear, silence and resignation coexist. These conditions mirror those in many G20 and non-G20 countries alike. When Namibian women shared purple hearts, they were not performing an imported gesture; they were articulating a shared frustration within a global pattern.
The broader picture is equally sobering. Gender-based violence in all its forms—intimate partner violence, sexual assault, harassment, trafficking, online abuse—cuts across income levels, political systems and geographic regions. Countries often assumed to be “stable” report crisis-level statistics. South Africa has one of the world’s highest femicide rates. India confronts persistent sexual violence that receives global attention. Brazil grapples with rising domestic violence. The United States faces staggering numbers of sexual assaults annually. The United Kingdom’s femicide data have triggered national debates. Namibia, though smaller in population, registers thousands of cases each year, including well over a thousand rapes in a twelve-month period. These figures, from vastly different contexts, reveal the same structural dynamic: violence functions as a chronic governance issue, not an episodic aberration.
The macroeconomic relevance of this crisis becomes clear when one examines its long-term effects. Women who experience violence often leave the workforce, relocate, withdraw from education, or endure long periods of physical and psychological recovery. Children exposed to violence experience developmental disruptions, later becoming adults whose productivity and wellbeing are compromised. Entire households absorb hidden financial burdens—transport to police stations, medical bills, legal fees, relocation expenses, and lost income. Employers see declines in performance, attendance and retention. Health systems absorb the cumulative effects. Police and justice institutions carry the caseload pressure. Every one of these outcomes carries a measurable cost. The World Bank’s global estimates place the economic toll of intimate-partner violence alone at around 2% of global GDP, which is an amount comparable to the annual cost of major global crises.
For a forum like the G20, which is tasked with identifying and mitigating global risks, the continued omission of GBV from its core agenda looks increasingly indefensible. The forum routinely deliberates on demographic pressures, human capital, digital security, productivity concerns and social unrest. Gender-based violence intersects with each of these. A society in which women are unsafe is a society in which economic progress rests on a fractured foundation. A labour force depleted by trauma and fear cannot meet the demands of modern productivity. A social contract that excludes half the population cannot sustain legitimacy. A justice system overwhelmed by gender-based crimes cannot guarantee rule of law. A digital economy that enables online exploitation without accountability cannot deliver on its promise. The logic is straightforward: violence is a macroeconomic constraint.
The Purple Movement, by rising at this precise geopolitical moment, has effectively forced this reality onto the global stage. What makes the movement particularly potent is that it does not rely on formal leadership. It is not the output of a conference or an organised coalition. Its strength lies in its decentralisation. Women have acted in synchrony without central coordination, which makes the symbolism harder to dismiss as sectoral advocacy. When an idea emerges simultaneously in multiple societies, from grassroots levels to professional spaces, it signals a structural shift in public consciousness. It signals to global leaders that the status quo is no longer socially viable.
For Namibia, the relevance of this shift is twofold. First, the country’s GBV statistics illustrate the gravity of the issue—which by itself would be insufficient to elevate it to global attention. What matters more is how these statistics reflect the wider African and global pattern: strong policy frameworks without adequate implementation, a mismatch between legal ideals and institutional capacity, and social norms that remain resistant to change. Second, Namibian youth and civil society have increasingly become catalysts in drawing attention to the failures of existing systems. When purple symbols circulate in Namibian digital spaces, they reflect a generational impatience with the gap between constitutional promises and everyday safety. This mirrors what is unfolding in Nigeria, Kenya, South Africa, India and Brazil. Namibia is not exceptional; it is representative. That representativeness matters in a global argument.
The question, then, is what should be done with this wave of visibility. For the G20, the entry point is not a moral appeal but an institutional one. If the forum is committed to strengthening global economic stability, then the protection of human capital must be treated as seriously as digital governance, climate adaptation or macro-financial resilience. Integrating GBV into the G20 agenda would not require a reinvention of the forum’s mandate. It would simply require an acknowledgement that violence functions as a systemic risk.
There are several ways this integration could unfold without distorting the forum’s purpose. The G20 could issue a formal recognition that gender-based violence is an economic and governance challenge with global implications. This would set a precedent for member states and regional blocs such as the African Union and the European Union. The forum could establish a technical working group dedicated to synthesising data, proposing risk indicators, and guiding countries on integrating GBV metrics into human capital strategies. National plans often suffer from data fragmentation; a shared G20 platform could improve data accuracy and comparability. The forum could encourage investment in digital safety tools in response to rising online exploitation. It could direct multilateral finance institutions to allocate resources to evidence-based prevention programmes through initiatives that remain chronically underfunded despite high cost-effectiveness. None of these measures requires political reinvention. They simply require political will.
Within African contexts, examples like Namibia show why global coordination would be useful. Many Southern African countries face similar challenges: large numbers of reported cases, overstretched policing systems, uneven implementation of legal frameworks, and rising youth activism demanding accountability. The purple symbol offers a shared regional language. Coordinated efforts on data, prevention, cross-border justice, and survivor support would allow countries to learn from each other’s successes and failures. Namibia’s experiences contribute valuable practical insight, but they also remind global actors that the issue is bigger than any one country.
The stakes of inaction are high. A world that continues to treat gender-based violence as a side issue will continue to absorb the economic shockwaves it produces. Not addressing GBV is an expensive choice. It weakens long-term development trajectories, erodes institutional trust, aggravates inequality, and undermines growth. Conversely, societies that protect women more effectively tend to exhibit stronger political stability, healthier labour markets, and more equitable development outcomes. In a century defined by demographic shifts and technological transformation, no economy can afford to discard half its potential.
What the Purple Movement has achieved is the opening of political space. Its purpose is not to offer solutions but to demand that those with power do so. It has translated diffuse frustration into a coherent signal at exactly the moment when global governance structures are searching for renewed legitimacy. For the G20, this creates a choice: continue to interpret economic policy through a narrow lens, or broaden its understanding of stability to include the safety and agency of women.
If the forum chooses the former, it risks becoming disconnected from the realities shaping global society. If it chooses the latter, it aligns itself with a future in which human capital is not conceptualised abstractly but anchored in the lived conditions of real people. Economies grow through people, and people cannot thrive under threat. The G20 has the capacity to set norms, influence funding flows, shape data frameworks, and legitimise new areas of policy attention. Recognising gender-based violence as an economic issue would signal that global prosperity cannot coexist with systemic harm.
The world has already voted with its symbolism. It has turned purple without waiting for permission. The colour reflects frustration but also clarity: safety is a precondition for development, not an accessory to it. This moment demands that global leadership structures catch up. When the G20 looks out at a world marked by purple, it should recognise what is being asked of it—not sentiment, but strategy; not sympathy, but responsibility; not gestures, but governance. The shape of the global economy will be determined not only by interest rates and fiscal policies but also by whether the world can guarantee the fundamental security necessary for its people to contribute, innovate and lead. The purple signal is not soft. It is an invitation to act before the costs grow even larger.
