Proposed UN Women's Agency Gains Key Ally

A broad coalition of NGOs and women’s rights groups can add new United Nations Secretary General, Kim Ban Ki-moon to the long list of high-profile world leaders calling for the creation of a new UN Women’s Agency.

The proposal for the creation of a new gender architecture includes the consolidation of three existing U.N. entities – the U.N. Development Fund for Women, the Office of the Special Adviser on Gender Issues and the U.N. Division for the Advancement of Women – under a single new U.N. agency to be headed by an under-secretary-general, the third highest ranking post in the world body.

The need for such an agency is starkly apparent to those charting United Nations involvement in the development of third-world nations. Confronting and eliminating institutionalized misogyny – especially as it pertains to the raising of female literacy rates and the increase of female economic independence – in the developing world is perhaps the most essential step towards social and economic growth. Aside from the obvious humanistic justifications for female equality, engrained discrimination against women is the number one cause of population growth – an issue certainly within the jurisdiction of the United Nations.

It remains to be seen where the UN will get the funding to expand the mandate of the proposed organization. If Bush’s recent track-record is any indication, the NGOs spear-heading the campaign might need to seek out unconventional sources of funding in order to expand beyond their current $65 million budget.

A coalition of over 140 international non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and women’s groups is gratified that Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon is expressing public support for the creation of a new U.N. agency for women.

“We believe the public support of the secretary-general is a very important step in moving closer towards the implementation of this new women’s entity,” June Zeitlin, executive director of the New York-based Women’s Environment and Development Organisation (WEDO), told IPS.

She said the secretary-general last week called on member states to take up this proposal, as did the women from around the world who were in New York for the U.N. Commission on the Status of Women (CSW), which concluded a two-week session Friday.

The proposal for a new U.N. women’s agency was made last November by a 15-member “High-Level Panel on U.N. System-Wide Coherence”, comprising heads of government, former world political leaders and senior government and U.N. officials.

On International Women’s Day, which was commemorated at the United Nations and around the globe last Thursday, the secretary-general said such a new body should be able to call on all of the U.N. system’s resources in the work to empower women and realise gender equality worldwide.

Posted by Heatscore
A jaded Raskolnikov waiting in disgust for this sick society's imminent paradigm shift.

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