UN may finally create agency to address women's issues globally

By Rebekah Mintzer

The UN General Assembly on 14 September 2009, the day they adopted a resolution supporting the creation of a new UN entity for women by combining existing UN agencies. (UN Photo/Evan Schneider)

8 April 2010 [MediaGlobal]: A long-awaited United Nations agency to deal exclusively with woman’s issues is on its way to becoming a reality. UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has provided an official proposal for the new entity, which would combine the major groups within the UN that currently deal with women’s issues. This proposal came after a resolution made by the General Assembly in September 2009 supporting the establishment of a new women’s agency. The resolution represented an important victory for women’s rights groups who have long been vocal advocates of a new agency for women.

“The agency would not replace what is already there but support and improve what is happening now and add to it, especially strengthening the effectiveness on the ground,” Rachel Harris of the Women’s Environment and Development Organization (WEDO) told MediaGlobal. “A new women’s agency would have the capacity to address many of the issues that are not able to be addressed in the current fragmented state of the existing agencies that work on women’s empowerment and gender equality.”

The Secretary-General’s plan must be reviewed by member states and adopted in the General Assembly through a resolution before it can be founded officially. Four entities currently deal specifically with women’s issues within the UN system: United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM), Office of the Special Adviser to the Secretary General on Gender Issues and Advancement of Women (OSAGI), the Division for the Advancement of Women of the Department of Economic and Social Affairs (DAW), and the International Research and Training Institute for the Advancement of Women (INSTRAW). According to Margot Baruch, Program Coordinator for the Center for Women’s Global Leadership at Rutgers University (CWGL) these four UN agencies lack the size, power, and autonomy, as well as the funding, to provide adequate assistance to the world’s women.

“For example, UNIFEM, the only unit with a (limited) field presence, is a fund, not an independent operational agency, that reports to the UNDP administrator, which means that it doesn’t have a seat at high-level decision making tables,” Baruch told MediaGlobal in an e-mail. “Gender units – from OSAGI to those in the specialized agencies – have limited ability to provide critical feedback or speak out on gender equality performance; too often these special advisor or gender focal points in the UN are used to defend the status quo rather than change it.”

The new entity for women, as outlined by the Secretary-General in his January 2010 proposal, would unite the four agencies that deal with women’s issues into a single, more powerful entity. The new entity would have its own Under-Secretary General and either its own executive board or its own section of the existing United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) executive board. The women’s group, like other major UN agencies such as the UNDP and United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), would be a subsidiary body to the General Assembly and report to the General Assembly through the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC).

WEDO and CWGL are both members of a 300-organization-strong coalition called the Gender Equality Architecture Reform campaign (GEAR) that has vocally advocated restructuring of UN agencies to better serve women. In light of plans to create the new women’s entity GEAR has articulated certain criteria for the entity’s effectiveness. These include country-level operations for the new agency, a transparent recruitment process for a qualified and visionary Under-Secretary General, and the inclusion of civil society and NGOs in decision-making and governing processes at all levels of the new agency. GEAR is also concerned with the funding of the agency, and would like to see the agency’s budget grow from the initial $500 million the Secretary-General suggested in his proposal to over $1 billion over time.

Currently, the choice to officially establish the entity is in the hands of member states, which must adopt a founding resolution in the General Assembly in order to make the new entity official. “The Secretary-General has been urging Member States to expedite matters and to take this up in the General Assembly as a priority for the current GA [General Assembly] session; and, he looks forward to a swift decision by the General Assembly and stands ready to appoint the senior official who will head the new entity once established,” Ari Gaitanis of the Office of the Spokesperson for the Secretary-General told MediaGlobal in an e-mail.