Speech: A coherent focus on results on the ground for women and girls

Speech: A coherent focus on results on the ground for women and girls

Opening Statement of UN Women Executive Director Sima Bahous to the Second Regular Session of the Executive Board

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[As delivered]

Welcome to our Second Regular Session of the UN Women Executive Board 2024.

I welcome our new President H.E. Ambassador Zoraya del Carmen Cano Franco, Deputy Permanent Representative of Panama to the United Nations, and our new Vice President Mr. Michal Miarka, Deputy Permanent Representative of Poland. I look forward to working with them during this session and their full terms.

I would also like to extend my sincerest gratitude to former President Mrs. Markova Concepción Jaramillo of Panama and Mrs. Joanna Skoczek of Poland.

Their steadfast leadership and commitment to the cause of gender equality and women's empowerment has been exemplary and I know they will remain formidable gender equality ambassadors.

Thank you also to our Vice-Presidents of the Bureau, H.E. Mr. Jonibek Ismoil Hikmat, Ambassador and Permanent Representative of Tajikistan; H.E. Ms. Halley Christine Yapi Bah, Ambassador and Deputy Permanent Representative of Côte d'Ivoire, and H.E. Mr. Andreas Von Uexküll, Ambassador and Deputy Permanent Representative of Sweden, for their tireless support for our UN Women triple mandate on gender equality and the empowerment of women.

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Our Bureau has always been, and I am confident will remain, the driver of the exemplary spirit of cooperation and dialogue that we enjoy with you, our Executive Board. I will say it again: the best friend is a critical one that loves you nonetheless. And I think you are that. Your support, your commitment, your guidance, your leadership and your wisdom has been a key part of the success story that is UN Women today and on behalf of all my team we thank you.

I hope you will forgive me for taking a little more of your time than I usually would in this session with my opening remarks. While our Session workload is not extraordinary our broader agenda is, with the Summit of the Future upon us, the commemoration of Beijing+30 and the update on our pivoting exercise that I promised you.

In two weeks, global leaders will convene here for the Summit of the Future. You are all well aware of the responsibility we have to ensure that this once-in-a-generation opportunity rises to a crucial moment for humanity. You are also well aware that rising to this moment has, at its heart, the imperative of delivering for women and girls and for gender equality. It comes at a time when we are all seized of the need to accelerate progress towards the 2030 Agenda, and when the evidence that SDG 5 offers one of the best solutions for the achievement of all the goals has never been clearer or more compelling.

We will continue to work with you, as our normative mandate demands, to make the Summit a success, to advise and support you to identify the policy priorities, the normative gains, the necessary investments, the revitalized Commission on the Status of Women that women and girls deserve and so urgently need. We believe the dual approach of mainstreaming gender equality and having dedicated actions on gender equality in the outcome document and its annexes (the Declaration of Future Generations and the Global Digital Compact) to be the right one.

And we look forward to hearing the voices of women and girls, women's civil society organizations, women's human rights defenders and young women at the Summit also. We are accountable to them.

The Summit also comes at a time when the crisis of women's rights rightly preoccupies us.

Next week I will again address the Security Council on the situation of women and girls in Afghanistan.We have now passed the three-year mark of Taliban rule, and we see deterioration where we thought there was nowhere lower to go.

The new morality law goes beyond the more-than 70 edicts, directives, and decrees that already stripped women and girls of their fundamental rights and their very humanity. UN Women has been documenting and raising the world's awareness of the impacts these measures have on women. For example, 8 per cent of the surveyed women indicated knowing at least one woman or girl who has attempted suicide in the last three years. It is our job to be the unrelenting voice of these women.

In Sudan, thousands of pregnant women or new mothers will die from starvation unless obstructions to humanitarian aid are lifted. Millions are at risk of sexual and gender-based violence. Yet, they are almost entirely excluded from participating in any of the multiple diplomatic efforts to find a solution, despite being the face of resilience and on the frontlines of the response.

In Gaza we are running out of ways of describing the horrors inflicted on the whole population. Nearly 41,000 people have been killed and 95,000 injured, the majority of whom are women and children. Families are starving. Preventable waterborne diseases are emerging. Girls are out of school and boys too. Women have no access to hygiene or safe spaces. There is no dignity in life in Gaza today. There is nothing more urgent than a ceasefire, unhindered access to humanitarian relief, the release of all hostages and above all, peace for all nations.

Throughout the world, we continue to see pushback on women´s rights, but we also see increasing demands on UN Women's work in crisis-affected countries with several UN peacekeeping and special missions closed or closing. We respond as we must, but this should alarm us. The world needs more multilateralism, not less.

As I told the Security Council last month, women on the ground tell us that a smaller UN footprint means greater jeopardy for them. It means less security, fewer opportunities for their voices to be heard. We need a strong multilateral system if we are to meet the inter-connected challenges of our time.

We launch in two weeks our latest Gender Snapshot report. It offers some cause for celebration: declining poverty, a narrowing gender gap in education, and a push for positive legal reforms. But it articulates again the ways in which we remain off track on SDG 5.

With just six years before the 2030 deadline for the Goals, not a single indicator under the gender equality Goal has been fully achieved, and only 2 out of the 18 are close to being achieved.

Without change, without acceleration, it may take 137 years to eradicate extreme poverty for women and girls; 68 to eradicate child marriage; 39 for gender parity in parliaments.

The frustration I know we share is greater still because we know that acceleration is achievable.

The annual global cost of the education skills deficit is over US$10 trillion yet we know full well how to get girls into school and how an education can transform their lives and benefit all of society.

Low- and middle-income countries will lose $500 billion in economic activity in the next five years if they don't address the gender digital divide, yet the Global Digital Compact is an explicit blueprint right in our hands.

We forego nearly $1 trillion in global GDP as a result of gender gaps in farm productivity and food system wages, yet we are perfectly familiar with interventions that empower women small-scale farmers.

A commitment to doing better and doing so focused and fast is at the heart of what we propose to be our true commemoration of the 30th anniversary of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action next year.

At this General Assembly we will kick off this process and embark on a programme of work focused on three areas.

First, working with Member States and other stakeholders to advance high-impact, high return-on-investment priority actions at country level. Those priority actions are based on what we know works.

This is about focus. We have identified six drivers that hold the potential to advance results and action on gender equality, and on the SDGs more broadly.

They are: ending violence against women and girls, peace and security, leadership, the care economy and unpaid care work, bridging the digital gap, and linking economic empowerment to climate action and transitions to green and blue economies, also an area new to the Beijing agenda. You will note that they include both old and new: insights from Beijing almost 30 years ago as well as new areas of work that UN Women and our partners have identified as key in recent years.

Second, working with civil society, in particular women's and youth organizations, to ensure they have the voice and resources they need, in the broadest sense, to claim rights and influence action.

Third, working within the multilateral system, to recommit to SDG 5 acceleration through the Beijing + 30 review, including through the Secretary-General's Gender Equality Acceleration Plan, so that it better delivers on gender equality.

Over the coming months you will see our advocacy, our communications and our engagement with all our partners, not least you, to ensure that we collectively do justice to the legacy and vision of the Beijing Platform for Action.

Our session is as substantive as always.

Our regular Structured Dialogue on Financing remains a crucial part of our deliberations where we examine the alignment of our financing with our mandate and Strategic Plan.

You will hear today how 2023 saw progress on many aspects of our financing, but we will also share our concerns for 2024.

We will present the joint cost recovery policy in response to Executive Board Decision 2020/8. We have benefited from your continued guidance and support as well as close collaboration with our sister agencies UNDP, UNICEF and UNFPA.

We believe our common position in support of harmonized cost recovery rates for other resources is key to our financial sustainability and ensuring that regular resources do not subsidize other resources in contravention of the QCPR.

We will report back in line with Decision 2024/3 on the JIU governance and oversight report. I thank Board President, Ambassador Zoraya del Carmen Cano Franco, who met regularly with the other Executive Board Presidents to harmonize the process. In this session, the Chair will share a roadmap moving forward but progress is already underway. As per your decision we will provide our views on the report in advance of the First Regular Session in 2025 of the Board.

Many of you will be aware that the JIU also conducted the first Management and Administration Review (MAR) of UN Women. This was collaborative and constructive, resulting in a high-quality report, which we will use to continue to enhanceour efficiency and effectiveness. Suffice it to say that we were encouraged by and appreciative of the generous assessment of the MAR and we very much embrace its recommendations.

Lastly, we will hear the report on the Executive Board's field visit to Moldova and Ukraine. You heard statements and saw pictures of the visit at the Annual Session. I share the view of Board members that such visits are crucial for the Board's oversight function and of the impact on the ground of our work together.

Our task ahead is as formidable as ever. We continue to approach it without the resources we need or envisaged in the Integrated Budget and we continue to ask for all your best efforts to afford us those resources. However, I am determined that we will do the best we possibly can with what we have.

It is in that spirit that I promised you a substantive update on our efforts to ensure that across UN Women's triple mandate and its operations we are ensuring a coherent focus on results on the ground for women and girls. We have referred to this as a pivot to the countries and regions.

We have decentralized, delegating greater authority to country and regional levels in procurement, finance, human resources and project management. In these areas we have seen a 50 per cent shift in transactions from HQ to the field since 2021.

We have shifted resources to strengthen capacities directly linked to country-level results. And within our approved funding framework we have allocated $72.45 million to regions and countries as a one-time investment.

We have improved planning, monitoring and reporting structures to more intentionally deliver and measure our impact on the ground for women and girls. You saw the results of this in my Annual Report of work, presented in our June Session.

We are now moving to leverage efficiency and effectiveness gains that come from placing positions in the right place.

As colleagues in our sister entities have found, some functions can simply be done better where costs are cheaper, where the time zone is more conducive to collaboration, where journey times are shorter, travel cheaper and more. This is not about dispersing our staff thinly across the world. Rather, it is about being intentional about ensuring a global lens to our footprint and how we best deliver.

To that end, we have selectedthree new locations for hubs alongside New York: Bangkok, Bonn and Nairobi. We will now be exploring further the details of these locations. We have begun a business-unit-by-business-unit process of looking at all global functions to identify which are best relocated. The majority of relocations of functions is foreseen to take place in quarters three and four of 2025.

I say "positions" not "people" deliberately. We fully appreciate the implications for our staff and have listened carefully to lessons from our sister entities. We are working closely with our Staff Council and we are making sure that the personal situations of our staff are taken into account with the maximum practical flexibility.

Just 24 hours ago - yesterday - we held our latest Town Hall on this topic and we heard again the perspectives of our teams at all levels, from all around the world. Let me assure you that I am as seized by the welfare of our staff as I am by any aspect of this process. I will not promise that everyone will be happy. But I will promise that everyone will be heard and that we will do the best we can for every person who works for UN Women.

While our commitment to effectiveness and efficiency is non-negotiable, I mean it when I say our workforce is our greatest asset and we will treat everyone with the respect and care they deserve.

Based on our estimates of cost savings, particularly those arising from lower post adjustment in corporate hubs other than New York, we expect the one-time costs associated with the move to be recouped through savings within one year, and from there on to represent efficiency savings which can be reinvested in the service of our mandate.

Lastly, these changes will be integrated into the development of our new Strategic Plan 2026-2029 and its Integrated Budget.

We will continue of course to keep the Board apprised of our developments.

I will not belabour the importance of the 12 months ahead of us. There is so much to be done but also so much opportunity.

Next year UN Women will turn 15. It is both very much the product of its rich history, but also unrecognizably stronger than the entity you created back in 2010. We will rightfully share pride in our collective achievement.

That achievement, the engineering and careful crafting of this essential institution for global efforts for gender equality, centred at the heart of the UN System, will be called upon more than ever. We must leverage the Summit and Pact for the Future to accelerate. We must leverage the 30th Anniversary of the Beijing Conference and Platform for Action to accelerate. We must leverage the final five years of the 2030 Agenda and the centrality of SDG5 for its achievement to accelerate.

I look forward to our discussions here, and the ongoing continuing strengthening and improvement of what we are, what we do and how we do it together.

I thank you.