Many of those attending the world’s largest meeting on women’s rights in New York this week are primed to defend the two key UN agencies tha
Isabel Choat at The Guardian:
Thousands of international delegates are gathering in New York this week for the world’s largest meeting on women’s rights. The United Nation’s annual Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) is an opportunity for government ministers, UN officials, NGO representatives and activists to discuss the global state of gender equality and women’s empowerment. This year, there will be a strong focus on “ensuring and strengthening access to justice”. But as senior UN figures urge countries to intensify their efforts to achieve gender equality, many of the delegates will be asking whether the UN is at risk of diluting its own commitment to women and girls. The question centres on a plan to merge UN Women, the agency dedicated to gender equality and women’s empowerment, with the UN’s sexual and reproductive health agency, the UNFPA. The aim of the merger is to improve efficiency, strengthen impact, reduce duplication and create a single body for governments and partners to work with. But since it was first proposed last year as part of UN80 – an initiative to reform the entire organisation – voices expressing concern over the idea have grown louder and more urgent. Women’s rights groups and a significant number of member states fear that restructuring the two agencies at a time of multiple global crises, plummeting levels of aid and a fierce rollback of rights is a high-risk strategy.
‘Dangerous climate’
Jessica Stern, co-president of the Alliance for Diplomacy and Justice, which advocates for human rights in US foreign policy, said: “These two agencies have been working in a resource-depleted environment for a very long time; they are not perfect and not the only solutions to achieving gender equality and ensuring people have access to reproductive rights, but they are what we have now. “And in the current climate,” she added, “when there is a violent and effective backlash, anything that destabilises the scant resources we have is dangerous.” Critics of the plan argue that creating a single organisation would almost certainly reduce funding from donor countries, with severe and lasting consequences for the world’s most vulnerable women and girls.
Gita Sen, co-founder of the feminist network Dawn, said: “In today’s climate, if you tell a funder that you are merging they will think ‘so how much will I save?’, so the risk is you will end up with less money, and God knows the amount of money now is totally inadequate – it’s a drop in the ocean in terms of what’s needed.” Stern added: “People around the world depend on UNFPA and UN Women programmes to counter sexual violence, domestic abuse, for accountability for marital rape and so-called ‘corrective rape’, for ‘honour’ killings. They depend on them for access to birth control and sex education. These agencies fight some of the most egregious forms of violence.”
The fate of two key women’s right’s organizations within the UN umbrella-- UN Women and UNFPA-- could be decided this week in New York.
