I wish to acknowledge our devoted Secretary of the Board, Jean-Luc Bories, and his excellent staff for as soon as once more making certain a flawlessly organized session.
And naturally, my heartfelt due to all my UN Girls colleagues—each right here in New York and across the globe. Your exhausting work in making ready paperwork, briefings, and updates has been invaluable as at all times.
This session has modelled the best way we aspire to work within the yr forward. The UN Girls Board stays a driving pressure for gender equality. Your engagement, your ambition, and your readability of goal proven over the previous two days are a supply of optimism as we face the very actual challenges forward.
The JIU [Joint Inspection Unit] Working Group has now been established, and the phrases of reference adopted by the Triple Board and the Board of UNICEF. We look ahead to the primary assembly of the Working Group as we advance this significant work collectively.
I said in our opening yesterday that 2025 is a demanding yr for all of us. We should make this yr of milestones rely. We’ll develop a brand new, forward-looking, and fit-for-purpose Strategic Plan that correctly articulates the ambitions we share in an ever-more-complex world. And whereas we stay longing for a robust monetary outlook, we should even be lifelike and able to navigate a constrained useful resource surroundings.
In these endeavours and extra, UN Girls stays guided by the mandate that you simply, the Member States, gave us in our founding resolution 64/289. That decision is obvious. Let me remind us of paragraph 51(a), which states:
The Constitution of the United Nations, the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Motion, together with its twelve vital areas of concern, the end result of the twenty-third particular session of the Normal Meeting, and relevant United Nations devices, requirements, and resolutions that assist, deal with, and contribute to gender equality and the empowerment and the development of ladies will present a framework for the work of the Entity.
And they also do, and they also will.
The Beijing Declaration, specifically, affords us the clearest roadmap we might want for.
- Throughout this session, on this pivotal yr, we have now spoken of the crucial of ladies’s full and equal participation in political life. Paragraph 13 of the Beijing Declaration underscores that girls’s empowerment and management in decision-making are important in reaching equality, growth, and peace.
- We now have spoken of the urgency of ladies’s financial empowerment—to lastly reap the advantages of equality within the workforce for all.
- The Beijing Declaration in paragraph 16 and elsewhere underscores this crucial, calling for the removing of boundaries to ladies’s financial participation, equal entry to sources, and the fitting to first rate work and truthful wages.
- We now have spoken of the crucial of ending violence towards ladies and women. The Declaration is unambiguous in paragraph 29 and elsewhere: violence towards ladies is a violation of human rights and have to be eradicated by means of motion, not phrases.
- We now have spoken in regards to the significance of peace and safety. The Declaration in paragraph 28 and elsewhere asserts the centrality of gender equality and ladies’s voice and management in its pursuit. Because the world faces rising battle and crises, the WPS [women, peace, and security] agenda should not be sidelined, ladies’s contribution should not be squandered. UN Girls will proceed to play its position in making certain it’s afforded its correct consideration and resourcing.
And we have now spoken about the truth that our work should serve ALL ladies and women—a precept we’ll echo at this yr’s International Women’s Day commemoration.
As underscored in paragraph 32 of the Beijing Declaration, this implies redoubling efforts to make sure that these dealing with a number of and intersecting boundaries—whether or not as a consequence of race, age, language, ethnicity, tradition, faith, incapacity, or Indigenous identification—can absolutely get pleasure from their rights and freedoms.
The upcoming 69th Commission on the Status of Women can be pivotal. We’ll set a course for a gender-equal world for all ladies and women. A robust forward-looking political declaration can be important. You, Member States, can be known as upon once more to craft it, and UN Girls seems ahead to supporting you.
Excellencies,
We now have heard your priorities and your issues.
As lead company on gender equality, we’re strengthening our coordination mandate to drive system-wide change.
The Secretary Normal’s Gender Equality Acceleration Plan gives a daring roadmap, and we’re dedicated to main its implementation, making certain each a part of the United Nations system delivers on gender equality with ambition and accountability. We look ahead to persevering with to replace you.
By means of our pivot to the nation stage and to the areas, we’re higher aligning our complete group—from my workplace to the sphere—to drive actual change the place it issues most. We welcome your ongoing questions and oversight.
We’re working with you on our subsequent Strategic Plan, the place we’ll collectively make UN Girls extra agile, higher resourced, and impactful at scale. We’re assured collectively we will develop a plan which really elevates our work in all its elements, according to our ambitions to repeatedly be extra environment friendly, more practical, and extra impactful.
These are advanced instances, however this Board is an indication of the best way the multilateral system is designed to rise to complexity. I applaud you all in your contribution to that. This Board has distinguished itself many instances over these final 15 years. You’ve gotten proven a formidable capability to search out efficient pathways ahead that distil the collective knowledge, the views, and the views of its membership. That capability is absolutely on show now as nicely.
I’m grateful in your unwavering dedication and engagement, in your steering, in your oversight, and in your assist. And I look ahead to working with you within the yr forward, and I thanks once more.
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