As , 2025 is a 12 months of milestones.
5 years to ship on the promise of the Sustainable Development Goals [SDGs], with SDG5 at its coronary heart.
25 years since UN Security Council resolution 1325 on women, peace, and security, demanding daring motion for the 600 million girls and ladies dwelling in crisis-affected areas. Though they’re usually the primary victims of battle, they’re at all times, with out exception, our best hope for peace, safety, and restoration.
30 years for the reason that Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action—30 years of progress we proudly rejoice, from stronger home violence legal guidelines to the rise of youth-led feminism and activism. However the job is way from full.
The Beijing+30 Action Agenda presents a roadmap, constructed in your nationwide stories and the six sub-themes of the Secretary-Normal’s report. We all know what should be performed, and it’s effectively inside our attain:
- First, bridge the digital hole.
- Second, deal with poverty, together with via social safety.
- Third, finish violence in opposition to girls and ladies.
- Fourth, advance girls’s management and decision-making.
- Fifth, advance girls, peace, and safety commitments; and
- Sixth, prioritize girls and ladies in local weather justice.
Throughout these six areas, we’ve a crucial cross-cutting “plus one”: to meaningfully have interaction younger girls and ladies, the architects of each in the present day and tomorrow.
In our try for a gender equal world, we should comply with this roadmap, for ALL girls and ladies. Empowering them is vital for overcoming in the present day’s many complicated challenges.
You’ll hear these themes many instances over this 12 months: at CSW69, at UNGA80, and past.
Collectively, we are going to demand daring, actionable, and well-resourced commitments to shut the gender equality hole and to fulfil our guarantees.
This 12 months additionally marks 15 years for the reason that General Assembly established UN Women through resolution 64/289, entrusting us with the mandate to drive gender equality and make sure the world reaps its long-overdue advantages.
We flip 15 in a vastly completely different working setting to our institution, one the place multilateral motion on the rights and empowerment of girls and ladies has grown more and more complicated. Growth finance continues to say no, whereas earmarking rises.
In 2024, UN Ladies’s resourcing underscored the acceleration of those tendencies, signalling a long-term trajectory of non-core outweighing core assets.
The very fact is that within the final two to 3 years, over half of UN Ladies’s high twenty core donors have shifted their growth coverage in ways in which weaken help for the UN and for our company. A few of these hostile impacts are already felt; others we anticipate shortly. Whereas UN Ladies has been considerably protected, we aren’t immune to those tendencies. For us to fulfil our mandate, it’s crucial we’ve the means to succeed in the ladies and ladies we serve.
With decision 64/289, our founding decision, Member States gave us a mandate, supported by Strategic Plans and thoroughly reviewed Built-in Budgets, to make sure its implementation.
As demand grows and funding declines, I need to stress: we can’t do extra with much less. We have now at all times valued the friendship of our Board, however now greater than ever, I ask for a monetary dedication that matches this priceless friendship.
As at all times, we proceed to attain the absolute best outcomes with the assets you entrust to us, throughout our regional places of work and our nation presences.
This has at all times been, and can at all times be, our dedication. And I’ll stay steadfast in making each greenback rely to drive significant influence. Given our constrained monetary state of affairs, we’re taking the required steps: containing prices and anchoring our work in our founding decision and the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Motion, in addition to different key intergovernmental requirements.
Within the spirit of operational excellence, I want to replace you on the “pivot to the country and regions”. It’s a course of that I do know a lot of you might be following intently. The pivot is about strengthening our supply of outcomes on the bottom, the place girls and ladies are, and leveraging our triple mandate on the regional and nation ranges to attain that.
It’s about making certain there’s a clear thread between our essential international normative work—in New York or elsewhere—and actual, tangible modifications within the lives of the ladies and ladies we serve.
As , we’re focusing our price range, prioritizing the nation degree, and empowering our Representatives and Regional Administrators with better authority. We’re additionally shifting some 190 positions from New York to Nairobi and Bonn, the place we will be nearer to the ladies and ladies we serve and leverage value efficiencies. Premises are secured in Nairobi and Bonn and might be prepared by this July. We anticipate to save lots of a minimal of USD 8 million a 12 months as soon as the modifications are accomplished—saving a median of USD 52,000 per 12 months in Bonn, and USD 32,000 in Nairobi for every worldwide place we transfer.
Prices corresponding to lease and safety will fall by over two-thirds—from USD 14,000 to USD 4,000 per submit—and we anticipate additional financial savings in journey. Maybe most significantly, these are positions being moved nearer to the individuals we serve, in order that they, our individuals, can serve higher.
I do know very effectively that these submit relocations are inevitably unsettling and disruptive for a few of our workforce, simply as they’ve been for our friends who’ve undertaken related processes. I absolutely respect that, and I commend our workforce for the spirit with which they’re approaching this. We’re additionally grateful for our Employees Council for its wonderful help in making these modifications work as greatest they will for everybody who works for UN Ladies and for being a key a part of our in depth consultations.
We’re working with every particular person employees member to debate how their private conditions match with these modifications. Our goal is to make this transition as clean and profitable as doable for our work and our workforce, our individuals, as a result of, finally, our influence is simply made doable due to our individuals.
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