The United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon announced the creation of a new more powerful UN organization for gender equality and empowerment of Women in a special ceremony organized at the UN Headquarters in
The agency will lead and coordinate the work undertaken by other UN agencies in relation to gender equality and play leading role in supporting and evaluating the work of the whole UN system in implementing gender mainstreaming. The creation of the new gender entity was welcomed by other UN agencies with a pledge to cooperate closely in making it a strong and well resourced UN partner. The entity coincides with the 15th anniversary of the adoption of the groundbreaking Beijing Platform for Action defining the necessary actions to achieve equality between men and women and an assessment of national progress towards its implementation.
Women in all parts of the world suffer violence and discrimination. Some
500.000 women still die in pregnancy and childbirth every year, and women
occupy less than one fifth of the seats in national parliaments. According to
some estimates, women represent more than 70% of the world's poor.The four existing UN women's rights organizations have been too fragmented and under-resourced to successfully address these problems and to deliver for women all around the world.
Mr.
Ban's announcement follows the United Nations General Assembly's agreement on the creation of the new UN rights entity reached after a month of intense intergovernmental negotiations and several years of preparing discussions.Significantly, the UN member states decided to go beyond UN Secretary
General's original proposal for the new entity, requiring that it needs to be made stronger than planned. The Member States decided that the initial annual
budget should be doubled to 1 billion USD and emphasized that the key function
of the entity should be to lead ambitious programming activities at country
level. They also underlined to fully involve civil society, in particular women's organizations in the work of the new agency at global, regional and national level.
Women's
rights and other non governmental organizations around the world have welcomed the resolution.Charlotte Bunch, speaking for the Gender Equality Architecture Reform (GEAR) campaign, a global network of civil society organizations that has been advocating for a strengthened UN gender equality architecture for years, said that they were “ecstatic that governments around the world recognize that such an entity is a top priority and that women's rights are central to ending poverty, achieving the MDGs and to bringing an end to violent conflict in the world.”
Partly Adapted from the New
Times for Women
