New UN Women’s Agency Now Within Reach – Urgent Action Needed
The World YWCA is working with the GEAR Campaign to build a United Nations that really works for all women by advocating for an independent UN entity that will enable governments and the UN system to achieve their goals on gender equality, women’s empowerment and human rights. The GEAR (Gender Equality Architecture Reform) Campaign officially launched last March, during the 52nd session of the Commission on the Status of Women. The civil society GEAR Campaign worked throughout CSW to advance these goals and now has over 250 organisations as members from all regions of the world, including the World YWCA.
The GEAR campaign, Women’s groups and civil society have been advocating for the establishment of a new UN agency for women that would dramatically improve the international response to violence against women and to the AIDS pandemic by uniting the four small, under-staffed and poorly funded parts of the UN currently devoted to women's issues (UNIFEM, OSAGI, DAW, and INSTRAW) and thereby put women's voices where they belong, in the forefront of the issues that face them.
The creation of a well-funded, dedicated UN agency to promote women's human rights and advance the worldwide struggle for gender equality has never been more urgent. Advocacy to ensure that Member States adopt this resolution at the September UN General Assembly is a top priority for the World YWCA.
The World YWCA supports that the new agency should be funded and staffed at levels that would guarantee its effectiveness; the structure should include strong field presence, a USD1 billion budget to start, and the capacity to run programmes, influence policy and bring gender experts to the joint work of UN agencies in every country.
The UN Secretariat has drafted a report, Institutional Options to Strengthen United Nations Work on Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women, or "The Options Paper", which outlines a range of possible structures for the new UN agency for women. The paper presents four structural options:
A. Maintaining the status quo
B. Creating an autonomous fund/programme
C. Creating a department within the Secretariat
D. Creating a composite entity
After careful review of each analysis on all four options provided by the GEAR campaign, the World YWCA supports Option D as one that will ensure a new UN women’s agency with structures that combine normative and programmatic mandates with the possibility of accessing funding from the UN as well as donor contributions. Therefore, the World YWCA recommends Option D as the most viable step forward, and we encourage Member States to consider Option D for adoption. In the case that Member States fail to accept Option D, the World YWCA will support Option B as alternative option.
The World YWCA now calls on its member associations to join in support for Option D of Institutional Options to Strengthen United Nations Work on Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women, and to lobby its governments and politicians to consider these Options as well. The time has come to demonstrate that the UN's salvation truly lies with women.
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