Speech: A strong supply of hope – Equality solves, it mends, it really works

My thanks additionally to our Vice-Presidents of the Bureau: H.E. Ms. Suela Janina, Ambassador and Permanent Representative of Albania; H.E. Mr. Walton Webson, Ambassador and Permanent Representative of Antigua and Barbuda; H.E. Mr. Umetsu Shigeru, Ambassador and Deputy Permanent Representative of Japan; and H.E Mr. Godfrey Kwoba, Ambassador and Deputy Permanent Representative of Uganda. I thank all of them for his or her skilful facilitation and steerage. Neither I nor my group take with no consideration the superb collaboration we get pleasure from with our Board. We are modelling the spirit of partnership, trustworthy dialogue and dedication that the multilateral system calls for.

UN Women is each the kid of UN reform and its customary bearer. Our 15 years have seen us, along with you, our Board, animate a really transformative mandate, integrating normative, coordination, and operational components synergetically. Through it, collectively, we now have delivered highly effective outcomes for girls and women.

You noticed this in the course of the Board’s subject go to to Zimbabwe earlier this 12 months, and in subject visits in prior years. Whether in improvement, humanitarian, battle, or more and more nexus contexts, you witnessed UN Women employees working alongside authorities, civil society, and the UN system for girls’s financial empowerment, tackling gender-based violence, and constructing local weather resilience.

We can not meet right here with out acknowledging the truth for girls and women in disaster conditions. War denies numerous ladies’s and women’ security, alternative and a good and dignified life. Mass displacement, lack of livelihoods, and the collapse of important providers power ladies into unsafe survival methods, with hovering charges of malnutrition, maternal dangers, and elevated violence.

In Afghanistan, 4 years after the Taliban takeover, the repudiation of all the things our work represents continues. Women and women are dealing with the current earthquakes’ devastating penalties with restricted help. Women are devalued, commodified, and erased from public life.

Seven in ten ladies and women killed in battle final 12 months have been killed in Gaza. And a couple of weeks in the past, the IPC [Integrated Food Security Phase Classification] declared famine in Gaza metropolis—for the primary time within the Middle East. Women and women in Gaza face a devastating each day actuality of struggling, loss of life, starvation, and displacement of their pursuit of security, dignity, and the essential requirements of life each for themselves and for these they take care of.

In Sudan, 5.8 million ladies and women are internally displaced. The protracted famine there has disproportionately affected ladies and women.

Over 12 million ladies and women, and more and more males and boys, are liable to gender-based violence, greater than triple in simply two years.

In Ukraine, over three years into the struggle, 1.8 million ladies and women are displaced. Women-owned companies are dropping earnings, ladies are spending extra time on unpaid care work, and gender-based violence has tripled for the reason that begin of the struggle.

I hear related tales, every with their very own grim specificities, wherever struggle is waged or battle is pursued, be it Haiti, Myanmar, Yemen, and past.

Across these conflicts, UN Women is current, unwavering. Not simply because ladies and women want us, however as a result of they’re the solution-makers, the indispensable rebuilders. They are the inspiration of sustainable peace. This is on the coronary heart of Security Council Resolution 1325, the twenty fifth anniversary of which we mark on this 12 months of anniversaries.

As member of the IASC [Inter-Agency Standing Committee], UN Women engages with the humanitarian system to put gender on the coronary heart of the humanitarian reset.

In 2024, we supplied gender experience to greater than three-quarters of the humanitarian cluster programs; we reached 5.3 million crisis-affected folks not directly, and 1.1 million instantly in nations together with Afghanistan, DRC, Palestine, Sudan, and Ukraine; and we supported greater than 1,200 women-led organizations working in disaster throughout disaster conditions.

We have 5 quick years to ship on the 2030 Agenda. We all acknowledge that SDG 5 on gender equality is a prerequisite for peace, for safety, and for all sustainable improvement. Our forthcoming SDG Gender Snapshot report, to be launched subsequent week, tells us what is feasible once we spend money on ladies and women.

In simply the final 5 years, 99 new or reformed legal guidelines internationally superior ladies’s rights. Rates of intimate companion violence are 2.5 instances decrease in nations with complete authorized and coverage measures on stopping gender-based violence. In simply the final 10 years, ladies’s management in local weather negotiations has greater than doubled.

In 2015, ladies occupied lower than 1 in 10 seats in local weather talks. Last 12 months, it was virtually 1 in 4, higher, however nonetheless removed from parity.

The High‑Level Meeting on Beijing+30 during UNGA80 will provide a second to take inventory and redouble our efforts for girls and women. Nothing much less will suffice. Member States, in your nationwide stories, you may have made clear the blueprint going ahead. It is grounded within the 12 vital areas of concern from the Beijing Platform for Action.

From your nationwide and regional stories, we now have derived six precedence areas for accelerated implementation: freedom from poverty, zero violence, equal energy and management, local weather justice, peace and safety, and full participation within the digital revolution. Cutting throughout all, amplifying the voices of younger ladies and women.

Our 2025 SDG Gender Snapshot report additionally reveals simply how far that progress can go, for instance, if we select to make concrete investments in simply two Action Areas of the Beijing+30 Action Agenda: closing the digital divide and ending poverty by means of complete investments in care and rising economies.

By closing the digital divide, 30 million ladies and women may exit excessive poverty by 2050. And we’d drive generational positive factors with USD 1.5 trillion in GDP generated by 2030—and over USD 100 trillion cumulatively by 2050.

By accelerating motion on investing in care, training, inexperienced financial system, labour markets, and social safety, we may scale back the variety of ladies and women in excessive poverty by 110 million by 2050, unlocking USD 342 trillion in cumulative financial returns.

These are the returns on funding in ladies and women that profit us all—and that we should always not waste.

I’m happy to notice that greater than 80 Member States have already submitted over 130 precedence actions to the Beijing+30 Action Agenda.

I look ahead to welcoming you all on 22 September, to listen to these commitments, and to working with you, as all the time, in making the ambitions of the Beijing Declaration a actuality for all ladies and women, in every single place.

I welcome the adoption of the agenda and workplan for this session, and your consideration of the provisional agenda for our first common session in 2026.

I additionally look ahead to your resolution on our new Strategic Plan for 2026–2029. It comes from probably the most intensive consultative processes undertaken thus far for a UN Women Strategic Plan: 4 informals, a workshop, our discussions in June each formal and casual, a worldwide survey of stakeholders, dialogues with civil society, consultations with UN entities and with non-public sector companions, and extra.

The plan displays all this. We have listened, we now have mirrored, and we now have integrated.

Your steerage has been clear: focus, prioritize, and reveal UN Women’s distinctive added worth round its triple mandate.

That is what we now have finished, anchoring our triple mandate—particularly our normative management, as you may have underscored—together with system-wide coordination and operational supply, as our comparative and defining collaborative energy.

We have made robust choices to convey extra focus, conscious that sources are ever extra scarce.

Seven cross-cutting outcomes within the earlier plan have turn into three:

• defending and advancing normative frameworks, legal guidelines and insurance policies;
• strengthening institutional accountability by means of financing, strong information, and practices that advance gender equality; and
• increasing ladies’s company and guaranteeing their entry to providers, sources, and alternatives to guide, resolve, and thrive.

We retain the 4 precedence thematic areas our stakeholders look to us to help:

• ladies’s management and decision-making;
• ladies’s financial empowerment in resilient economies;
• ending violence towards ladies and women; and
• ladies, peace, safety and humanitarian motion.

We strengthen our deal with partnerships, revitalizing our UN system coordination providing deepening collaborations with authorities, ladies’s machineries, women-led organizations and actions, the non-public sector, males and boys, and younger folks, focusing all the time on affect, not simply on actions.

We additional strengthen our capability by means of results-based administration, transparency, and linking sources and outcomes, in addition to in modern areas resembling information, innovation, expertise, strategic foresight, and extra.

We can be fit-for-purpose to ship this Plan in a fast-changing world. Our work on communication and advocacy will reinforce our main voice and affect to advance ladies’s rights and gender equality.

Our flagship effectiveness and effectivity initiative, the pivot to areas and nations, is now totally underway. It will ship better affect by means of proximity to these we serve and people we work with, alongside worth for cash by means of leveraging more cost effective obligation stations. Again, this all displays your steerage.

This Strategic Plan deserves a sound monetary basis. The Integrated Budget 2026–2027, reflecting the steerage of the Advisory Committee on Administrative and Budgetary Questions, establishes real looking, prudent earnings projections given the funding challenges the UN and others face. It proposes whole estimated voluntary contributions of USD 1.05 billion, a USD 50 million discount in common sources and USD 70 million enhance in different sources, in comparison with its predecessor. It consists of an institutional finances of USD 202.4 million, USD 2 million lower than 2024–2025. 87.3 per cent of whole estimated sources are for improvement and humanitarian actions.

It is opportune to contemplate the Integrated Budget alongside our common Structured Dialogue on Financing. It is essential that we’re all aligned on UN Women’s financing as the mandatory prerequisite for outcomes, together with the essential position of normal sources, multi-year funding, and predictable and versatile different sources.

We will work along with you to proceed to diversify the funding base, to strengthen partnerships, and to make the case for investing in ladies and women. We may even proceed our dialogue on the JIU [Joint Inspection Unit] assessment of governance and oversight.

I imagine our dedication to working with our Board and all facets of our governance is unambiguous and clear. We look ahead to collaborating with the working group and this Board to make sure accountability and effectiveness.

From Beijing+30 to UN80, from the Strategic Plan to the structured dialogue on financing, we’re laying the foundations of a stronger, ever-better UN Women and, by means of us, a greater UN system. Our collaboration, your steerage, give us a lot to look ahead to.

This collaboration performs out in, arguably, probably the most advanced multilateral house in a minimum of a era. I’m conscious of that. It is exactly for such instances that the multilateral system was created, the UN Charter and its name for equality drafted, and the United Nations constructed. We make the world higher, rise to its shared challenges, solely collectively.

That is why we’re totally engaged with the Secretary-General’s UN80 initiative.

We stay the system’s main voice for a reformed UN that navigates this tough context to the advantage of ladies and women; and for a powerful entity for gender equality, that advances the rights, company, and empowerment of ladies and women throughout all of the work of the UN system.

Through our co-chairing of the Development Cluster of UN80, UN Women additionally helps UN system–vast pondering on concrete proposals for reform, streamlining, and efficiencies.

Gender equality all the time was, all the time can be a robust supply of hope.

That is why UN Women’s message is unwavering: it’s lengthy overdue however by no means too late to grab the rewards of gender equality, a world the place ladies, males, women, and boys stand collectively as equals to heal our planet, our nations, our communities. The information are unambiguous. Equality solves. It mends. It works. There is neither problem nor disaster that’s not improved by equality, from our local weather to our wars to our economies.

The alternatives are really immeasurable.

That is why I’m honoured to proceed to function UN Women’s Executive Director. UN Women’s mandate is extra essential than ever. My dedication to it stays unwavering. I’ve promised you a extra accountable, clear, and impactful UN Women, not least within the disaster contexts that rightly preoccupy Member States. I imagine that’s what I’ve delivered and can proceed to ship. That has been doable due to your robust help. And I’m clear that it’s, at its coronary heart, because of the extraordinary group of execs it’s my privilege to guide. With this Board, this group, this new Strategic Plan, I couldn’t ask for a greater basis for my second time period, working along with you to take the mandate you afforded us even additional.

I look ahead to standing with all of you as we go into our new Strategic Plan and thanks, in anticipation of the work that we’ll proceed to do collectively.