Deputy Secretary-General’s remarks to Excessive-Stage Occasion “The Power of WPS – Advancing Inclusive Decision-making in Peace and Security” | Secretary-General

Thank you to Ambassador Naanda, and the Government of Namibia for internet hosting us right now. I additionally thank UN Women, the African Union, and the Women, Peace and Security and Humanitarian Action Compact for convening this necessary commemoration – ladies on the desk. 

The Beijing Declaration set a world imaginative and prescient for ladies’s equality and empowerment thirty years in the past, and Namibia turned that imaginative and prescient into motion on the Security Council. Under Namibia’s presidency, the Council adopted a decision that essentially modified how the world understands peace and safety. 

Resolution 1325 acknowledged a fact that girls all over the place had lengthy identified: peace can’t be constructed or sustained with out their management.

Namibia’s braveness in 2000 set a world normal, and the identical willpower that drove this agenda ahead then should drive us to ship on it now. 

We know this comes at an extremely tough second. 

Last 12 months, international navy spending was 2.7 trillion {dollars} whereas we face a shortfall of 4.2 trillion {dollars} per 12 months to finance the sustainable growth agenda. 

Which means we spend way more on weapons than we’re on stopping the conflicts that require them.

So, we’ve got to ask ourselves: are we implementing Resolution 1325, or are we right here right now merely to recollect it?

The Windhoek + 25 Declaration, adopted earlier this month, strengthened what Namibia has maintained from the beginning: inclusion shouldn’t be about headcount, it’s about who holds authority. Women should form agendas, draft agreements, and oversee their implementation.

The Accountability Report printed right now tracks the progress and achievements of signatories throughout the 5 pillars of the plan of motion within the Compact: financing, participation, management, financial safety, and safety.  

The Compact now has 240 signatories – governments, UN entities, regional our bodies, civil society, and the personal sector – double the quantity that it had 4 years in the past. Last 12 months Compact companions put greater than 2.1 billion {dollars} into this work and reached greater than 27 million ladies and women.    

If we have a look at the place the implementation has been intensified – DRC, Sudan, South Sudan, Palestine, Ukraine – in each considered one of these locations, ladies are already mediating truces, operating well being providers, and restoring group belief whereas formal negotiations – most of which they aren’t concerned in – stall.

But the report additionally reveals fractures we can’t ignore. 

Fifty eight % of signatories confronted funding cuts final 12 months. Nearly 1 / 4 of governments reported rollbacks on ladies’s rights, and assaults on multilateralism are undermining the very programs designed to guard these beneficial properties. 

This is the contradiction we face: the structure for ladies’s participation is increasing whereas the sources required to maintain it are being hollowed out.

So, what can we do? 

The Compact identifies three priorities: prevention, solidarity, and motion. 

First, prevention means implementing the sustainable growth targets and tackling the foundation causes of battle: inequality, exclusion, and impunity. It requires early warning programs that embody gender evaluation, so ladies’s insights information how we anticipate and defuse crises earlier than they escalate.

Second, solidarity and help means standing with individuals and dealing throughout areas and generations. It means connecting native ladies’s teams to nationwide choice making and linking skilled mediators with younger peacebuilders who’re already reshaping their societies. 
The younger leaders I’ve met doing this work are unimaginable, so is their conviction and their braveness is unstoppable. 

We want that subsequent technology within the area: from millennials to Gen Z and the rising Gen Alpha, youth are already reshaping how peace is constructed and sustained. 

Third, Action means requiring ladies in each get together’s delegation, with quotas required for ladies in management and in every get together’s delegation.  

It means gender parity in mediation groups and devoted funding strains for ladies peacebuilders. 

It means protecting logistics so that girls can truly take part. 

It means supporting and defending ladies peacebuilders from retaliation to allow them to communicate freely with out worry of reprisal. 

All three priorities – prevention, solidarity and motion – are achievable steps, and the Secretary-General has outlined precisely tips on how to take them. 

Many of those require stronger political will and extra funding. Member States can endorse minimal targets for funding and girls’s participation. They can pilot quotas in peace processes. They can maintain funding for initiatives just like the Women’s Peace and Humanitarian Fund. 

All these are selections inside our attain right now and the Compact is designed to assist us make them.
The Compact is a dwelling instrument designed to trace progress, expose gaps, and maintain all of us accountable to the identical requirements. 

What it can’t do is substitute for political management – that should come from our leaders.
Excellencies, 

Let me shut with this.

We will measure the success of this agenda by the variety of conflicts resolved by way of inclusive options; the variety of ladies who instantly affect peace negotiations and safety sector reform; and the variety of survivors who entry justice and reparations.

We will realize it has succeeded when peacebuilding and sustainable growth transfer hand in hand — giving ladies and their communities the prospect to construct a way forward for stability and alternative.

Those are the metrics that matter.

Twenty-five years in the past, Namibia led the best way. Today, below the management of Her Excellency President Netumbo Nandi-Ndaitwah — the primary elected girl President of Namibia — that legacy continues with renewed goal and resolve. She laid down the gauntlet for all of us to behave with the identical braveness and conviction that outlined Namibia’s management then.

We can meet that problem and switch the promise of Resolution 1325 right into a dwelling actuality for each girl, for each woman in each technology.

Thank you.