Working Together for Gender Equality

It is my pleasure to share the podium with my esteemed colleagues and to speak on behalf of UNFPA.

First of all, I would like to congratulate Ms. Bachelet on the formal establishment of UN Women on the 1st of January, which was also my first day of work at UNFPA.

Secondly, let me just say this: We welcome UN Women, and the 100 Day Action Plan, and we look forward to working closely together. We believe that progress for women is progress for all.

As the UNFPA Executive Director, I look forward to working with my colleagues here on the podium to support UN Women and make sure that our work is well coordinated.

Today I would like to address three things:

1. Capacity building for gender equality and gender mainstreaming
2. Collaboration with UN Women, and
3. Gender accountability

First let me talk about capacity building for gender equality and gender mainstreaming.

At UNFPA – as I am sure is true in the other agencies – we continue to enhance the capacity of our partners and our own staff to advance gender equality.

On human rights, we are happy to be partnering with the UN Staff College, UNICEF, UNDP, UN Women, and others to update the UN Common Package on the Human Rights-Based Approach to programming, which promotes women’s rights as human rights.

And we are proud of our collaboration with UNICEF, UN Women and UNDP to develop a new e-learning package on gender mainstreaming and UN coherence, which will be launched at the upcoming Commission on the Status of Women.

And here I would like to talk about how we envisage UNFPA collaboration with UN Women.

First of all, I would like to thank Ms. Bachelet for her decision to visit countries that have high rates of maternal mortality. We thank you for this advocacy, which will highlight the connections between gender inequality and poor maternal health. And I would like to assure you that UNFPA, together with our partners in the H4+, which includes UNICEF, WHO, the World Bank and UNAIDS, will support your strong advocacy through our continuing efforts on the ground to ensure universal access to reproductive health.

In both development and humanitarian settings, UNFPA focuses on the delivery of quality gender-responsive sexual and reproductive health services, and addressing sexual and gender-based violence. And we have been working to ensure good inter-agency approaches to gender-based violence within UN Country teams. We look forward to continuing this collaboration with UN Women, including through the Secretary General’s UNiTE Campaign to end violence against women.

We also look forward to closer collaboration with UN Women in promoting implementation of UN Security Council resolution 1325. In 2009 UNFPA and UNIFEM started supporting governments to develop national action plans on 1325, and so far plans have been completed by Sierra Leone and Uganda and one is underway in Nepal.

When it comes to the area of population and development, UNFPA focuses on the gender dimensions of migration, ageing, urbanization and climate change. And we are supporting countries to develop gender responsive policies and programmes in these areas.

As we support countries to carry out their national censuses, UNFPA is expanding its work on gender statistics. And we look forward to collaborating with UN Women to ensure that evidence on gender is available at all levels.

UNFPA has also made a unique commitment to integrate its gender equality and human rights goals and gives particular attention to the cultural contexts within which we operate. And we work with a broad range of stakeholders, including men and boys and a range of civil society groups

Our collaboration with UNICEF on the abandonment of female genital mutilation/cutting shows how culturally responsive interventions, grounded in human rights, advance the empowerment of women and gender equality. And we look forward to sharing our experience in this area with UN Women.

Finally, I would like to say a few remarks about Gender Accountability.

UNFPA is strongly committed to accountability for gender within our organization. We are now doing a mid-term evaluation of the Gender Goal in our Strategic Plan and will present the findings to our Executive Board in June.

UNFPA is developing a gender marker system, following the guidance of the UN Development Group and harmonizing with UNDP and UNICEF, and the Inter-Agency Standing Committee dealing with humanitarian affairs. The Marker System will help UNFPA to more effectively monitor the allocation of resources for gender mainstreaming and improve planning and programming in the area of gender equality.

The initiatives I have mentioned are simply a sampling of ways that UNFPA is working to collaborate on gender mainstreaming within the UN System and with our partners – both in this room and beyond.

From here we look forward to ongoing collaboration with UN Women and our other sister agencies - in support of the countries we serve - to make greater progress for girls and women.