Accelerating Progress towards Gender Equality and Women's Empowerment
Ms. Joanne Sandler, Ad Interim Executive Director, UNIFEM

Date: 15 October 2007

Occasion: 62nd Session of the UN General Assembly, Third Committee, 15 October 2007. Agenda item 63(a): Advancement of Women.

Mr. Chairperson, Distinguished Delegates, Colleagues, and Friends,
I would like to congratulate you, Mr. Chairperson, and other members of the bureau on your election to this committee.

I thank you for this opportunity to present the Note by the Secretary-General on the Activities of the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM). The report provides an update on progress towards results and challenges faced in supporting countries to advance gender equality and women's empowerment. Let me thank the UNIFEM Consultative Committee (CC) Members who represent the General Assembly for their guidance to UNIFEM, including the Permanent Representative of Estonia as Chair, and representatives from Jordan, Mexico, Norway and Sudan, as well as members who rotated off the Committee in 2006, namely Canada, Niger and Slovenia. The CC's guidance is critical to our work.

UNIFEM's work is guided by four-year plans. Our current plan covers the period 2004 to 2007. The report before you (A/62/188) highlights practical actions in the four goal areas that frame our plan — reducing feminized poverty and exclusion; promoting gender equality in democratic governance and post-conflict reconstruction; ending violence against women; and halting and reversing the spread of HIV/AIDS. It demonstrates that progress requires strategic partnerships between governments, civil society, the UN, the private sector and many others. At the mid-point of the MDG target date — with too many countries falling behind — strengthening progress and partnerships in these areas are more important than ever.

My presentation today focuses on the outcome-level results that we use to track UNIFEM's contributions to advancing national, regional and global priorities for achieving gender equality and women's empowerment. I will highlight both examples and challenges for moving forward.
I. The first result area is formulating and implementing plans, laws and policies that promote gender equality and women's empowerment in line with CEDAW

UNIFEM extends support to countries to strengthen the laws and policies that determine options and opportunities for women to secure their human rights and gender justice. Sometimes, these are broad national action plans or gender equality policies, for which UNIFEM has provided support in 27 countries over the past three years. Sometimes they are sector-specific laws or plans, such as formulation or implementation of national action plans or laws on ending violence against women that UNIFEM supported in more than 30 countries from 2004 to 2007, with another 38 supported through the UN Trust Fund to End Violence against Women.

In line with a stronger focus on national ownership, UNIFEM's assistance increasingly prioritizes mainstreaming existing gender equality action plans or policies in national development strategies, in poverty reduction strategies, in sector strategies, and in other national planning processes. UNIFEM's assistance in Afghanistan, as an example, to support the Ministry of Women's Affairs efforts to ensure that the National Action Plan for Women's Advancement is fully incorporated into the Afghanistan National Development Strategy, Afghanistan's PRSP, shows how line ministries, the executive, parliamentarians, civil society, and the development assistance community all have critical roles to play if commitments and a holistic strategy of support for gender equality are to be fully incorporated in national priorities.

To ensure gender mainstreaming, national plans related to gender equality must be integrated into and financed through national development strategies, sector-wide approaches and other new aid modalities. To facilitate this goal, UNIFEM is supporting — in partnership with the European Commission and the International Training Centre of ILO — national and regional consultations to bring gender equality advocates into the discussions on aid effectiveness and integrate gender equality priorities into national planning processes and budgets.

Laws and policies, to translate into change, need to be implemented, with adequate funds and personnel. For example, in Ecuador, the Government has agreed to a national action plan to end violence against women, allocating several million dollars to jump start implementation. The MDG Achievement Fund financed by Spain, in its first round, allocated multi-million dollar grants to at least three countries to implement national action plans to end violence against women. The UN Trust Fund to End Violence against Women, which UNIFEM manages, now allocates the bulk of its resources to initiatives focused on implementation.

II. The second result area is strengthening mainstream institutions to implement commitments to gender equality

The mainstream institutions that generate policies and deliver services must have capacity to understand gender-differentiated priorities and allocation of resources. There is perhaps no more concrete and practical tool that UNIFEM has supported than gender-responsive budgeting. In 2001, when UNIFEM co-convened the first Brussels consultation on gender budgeting, only a handful of countries had experimented with these initiatives. Today, more than 70 countries have some experience — in some cases, this is limited to capacity development, but in other cases it includes building full-fledged, multi-dimensional gender budgeting strategies that encompass local-level, sectoral and national budgets.

In 2004–2007, with support from many bilateral donors, UNIFEM and other UN partners provided assistance in 41 countries, almost double the number during our previous four-year plan. We see how powerful these initiatives can be when Ministries of Finance take the lead in influencing resource allocations in support of gender equality and position gender-responsive budgeting as a critical building block in overall public sector reform strategies; when Parliamentarians take an interest in the gender dimensions of budgets; when civil society organizations become active in budget processes. UNIFEM has been privileged to work with Finance Ministries in Morocco, Ecuador, India, Senegal, Venezuela and Egypt on gender budget initiatives. It is now possible to track and see increased allocations in key areas, such as gender-responsive agricultural inputs in Morocco or the gender dimensions of HIV/AIDS in Senegal.
Another example of UNIFEM support to implementation is its work on ending violence against women. Resolution 61/143 on Intensification of Efforts to Eliminate all Forms of Violence against Women, which the General Assembly adopted last year, calls for strengthening the UN Trust Fund to End Violence against Women and for States to increase their support to the Trust Fund. We are pleased to report progress on both of these fronts. Contributions to the Trust Fund tripled between 2004–2005 and 2006–2007, reaching nearly US$12 million for this biennium (2006–2007). This falls far short of the nearly US$100 million in requests that the Trust Fund receives annually, but is a positive indicator of growing commitment.

Increased resources are allowing the Trust Fund to strengthen a number of its areas of support, including for implementation of existing plans and laws to end violence against women. The UN Inter-Agency Programme Appraisal Committee (PAC) of the Trust Fund — many of whose members also serve on the Task Force on Violence against Women of the Inter-Agency Network on Women and Gender Equality — is working to strengthen the grantmaking and evaluation processes to enable the Trust Fund to generate greater knowledge on what works to end violence and how the UN can provide coordinated assistance to countries to advance implementation. Increased resources have allowed the Trust Fund to open special grantmaking windows in areas needing greater investment. A private sector partner, Johnson and Johnson, has joined bilateral donors and the Global Coalition on Women and AIDS to open a window on the inter-linkages of HIV/AIDS and violence against women, with a dedicated evaluation and knowledge-building strategy to underpin support to governments and civil society groups to work together to address the twin pandemics. Grantees in Botswana, the Dominican Republic, India, Nepal, Nigeria, Thailand, and Viet Nam have already started implementation.

A hallmark of progress is that, in 2007, there are many more mainstream institutions — from Ministries of Finance to private sector partners, from UN Country Teams to multilateral development banks, from UN governing councils to the UN Security Council — that have placed gender equality and women's rights higher on their policy and programming agendas. But challenges remain. This is clearest in the case of the use of rape as a weapon of war. Promoting and protecting women's human rights requires an end to impunity for perpetrators, incentive systems that reward better responses, and partnerships that vastly expand resources and capacities of institutions to respond. A new partnership, UN Action against Sexual Violence in Conflict, which brings together 12 UN entities to assist UN Country Teams to enhance strategies for prevention and protection in situations of conflict, is taking the lead on efforts to increase action and resources dedicated to meet this challenge. But much more is needed.
III. The third result area is supporting capacities of gender equality advocates to influence mainstream development

UNIFEM joins with many UN, bilateral, NGO and national partners to invest in enhancing the capacity and voice of gender equality advocates and women's networks to expand their leadership and participation in mainstream policy processes, including on poverty reduction strategies and MDG processes. In addition to our work with national women's machineries, women's parliamentary caucuses and women's regional networks, we increasingly focus on support to under-represented or marginalized groups, including HIV-positive women's networks, migrant women's networks, home-based workers networks, and indigenous and Afro-descendant women's networks.

UNIFEM provided support — often in partnership with UNDP — in 15 countries in 2006 to strengthen women's participation as voters, candidates and decision-makers in elections, including in post-conflict countries. We have learned about the common constraints women face, including lack of resources and networks, and in some cases, basic security. In Kenya UNIFEM manages a multi-million-dollar, multi-donor basket fund to tackle these issues comprehensively, assisting the women's caucus to lobby for reforms for the upcoming elections. Their work with the Parliamentary Select Committee on Justice and Constitutional Affairs led to the inclusion of 30 percent representation for women. Advocacy for reserved seats for women in parliament and local authorities and on electoral lists for mayoral elections continues. Our support to regional networks — such as the Arab Women's Parliamentarian Network and networks in the Pacific — and to global partnerships such as the iKNOW Politics initiative — are extending assistance to a much broader group of countries and women.

UNIFEM also supports the positioning and strengthening of women's ministries to become the engine of gender mainstreaming with other government ministries and to open up spaces for engagement with women's NGOs. This is critical in relation to CEDAW implementation, where national women's machineries play an important coordination and capacity-development role. During the last three years, UNIFEM partnered with nearly 90 national machineries — often through innovative regional strategies such as the bi-annual Commemorating Beijing convenings in South Asia or the consultations on gender and aid effectiveness in Africa — and together with UN partners has supported 72 countries to report on, implement or monitor CEDAW.
An example is our partnership with the Ministry of Gender and Development in Liberia. The country's new rape law aligns the penal code with the human rights standards set out in CEDAW and was adopted after concerted advocacy by the Ministry and rights organizations. Advocacy in support of the law has opened up space for a national dialogue and mobilization on the issue of rape, and the United Nations Peacekeeping Mission in Liberia (UNMIL) is now using the law to strengthen the curriculum for police training.

IV. Moving forward

There is no doubt that we are at a critical juncture on the path to gender equality and women's empowerment. In the context of UN reform, renewed commitments to achieving the MDGs, and the roll out of the aid effectiveness agenda, there are new opportunities and challenges for expanding effective strategies and practices to assist countries to deliver on gender equality and women's empowerment and to achieve the MDGs. In the upcoming months, during the Financing for Development discussions, the Commission on the Status of Women's focus on financing for gender equality, and the Ghana High-Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness, UNIFEM will be working closely with partners to support stronger attention to gender equality and women's empowerment in discussions on resource allocations.

UNIFEM undertook a cumulative assessment of the implementation of its four-year plan earlier this year as a basis for formulating its 2008–2011 Strategic Plan which was recently approved by the UNDP-UNFPA Executive Board. I am also happy to update the financial information in the report you have before you: UNIFEM's resource base increased significantly in 2007 and we have met our target for core resources for the first time in this four-year plan.

The challenges that emerged from our assessment of our four-year plan are not unique to UNIFEM, but relevant to most entities that advocate for stronger action and investment in gender equality and women's empowerment. I will end by highlighting three of these:

Replication and upscaling: There is a lot of discussion on the need to scale up or replicate what works. In some cases, this is a matter of life and death, such as in relation to maternal mortality, where we know what works but continue to under-invest. While there is no recipe or vaccine for confronting the pervasive nature of gender discrimination, there are approaches that have proven successful in generating results. With regard to ending violence against women and reducing vulnerability to HIV/AIDS, for instance, we know that integrated national strategies that bring health care, legal and education systems together to devise coordinated and mutually reinforcing strategies are key to enhancing prevention and protection for women and girls. Greater investment in evaluation, documentation and dissemination are needed. UNIFEM is making this a central focus in its upcoming Strategic Plan, and bringing forward existing initiatives — such as its partnership with the World Bank and the International Centre for Research on Women on supporting results-based initiatives or the Trust Fund evaluation strategy to rigorously evaluate innovative efforts to address the twin pandemics of VAW and HIV/AIDS — that test effective models for supporting more systematic replication and upscaling.

Capacity development: With work on gender equality and women's empowerment receiving greater attention and political will, the need for more systematic and rigorous approaches to capacity development is crucial. Greater investment in south-south exchange and in proven approaches that lead to sustainable capacities needs to be higher on all of our agendas. This will be a high priority in UNIFEM's upcoming strategic plan and one in which we will work closely with all UN partners.

And, finally, partnerships and coordination remain critical: within and between countries and regions, between women and men, and between UN organizations. For the UN system to support countries to advance gender equality, a more vigorous effort is needed to ensure coordination and coherence at all levels, and especially on the ground, where it matters most. There is general agreement on the need to strengthen the entities and structures that support gender equality in the UN. This strengthening must yield direct benefit and enhance capacity for country-level initiatives. If the UN is to be a valued partner in work to achieve the MDGs, it must focus and step up holistic and coordinated support to countries to deliver on national priorities for development and gender equality.

Towards this end, UNIFEM will continue to invest in critical efforts to allow it to work on both parts of its mandate — direct support to countries and mainstreaming gender equality across the UN system. We appreciate the partnerships and support we have received from UN Member States and look forward to continuing to walk together on the path to achieving gender equality.
We thank you for your attention.