AIDS-Free World Speaks Out on the New UN Women's Agency

July 2, 2010

While celebrating this historic moment, AIDS-Free World sounds a note of caution about leadership and funding for UN Women.

Today, Friday July 2nd, the UN General Assembly will approve the creation of UN Women, the long-awaited, long-debated, long overdue new international agency for women. UN Women will replace a tiny, fragmented and under-funded group of UN entities dealing with gender (UNIFEM included), with one prominent institution headed by an Under Secretary-General.

It has taken four years of intense negotiation to reach this point. AIDS-Free World is elated that Member States have finally taken this bold step toward reform. But our elation is not unqualified. Even as we recognize the enormous potential of UN Women, our excitement is tempered by serious concerns about its development.

Those concerns are most deeply felt in two particulars.

First, the Secretary-General is not meeting his commitment to a fair, open and transparent process for appointing the new Under Secretary-General. Thus far, the procedure smacks of all the same old UN patterns: names are being whispered in the corridors; governments alone have been formally requested to submit candidates; rumors are running riot; wheeling and dealing abound; the precise interviewing and selection process is a matter of secrecy. No one knows whose names have definitively been put forward; no one knows the credentials of the candidates. And the women of the world, outside the precincts of the United Nations, have been entirely excluded. By and large, they do not even know that UN Women will exist, let alone how they might apply for so important a position.

This makes a mockery of fair, open and transparent.

According to the resolution creating the new agency, the Secretary-General has 75 days to set things right. If he fails to reverse the insider process underway, and sticks instead to business as usual in his search for a new leader, then the change in culture that UN Women is supposed to represent will have been sorely undermined.

Second, the Member States are notably vague on the critical issue of funding. UN Women needs one billion dollars to start off its work on solid footing. If no funding goal is set, the objectives of the agency will be put at risk, but it will be difficult to hold donor countries accountable. This is a particularly problematic situation, considering that women’s issues are historically, notoriously underfunded around the world.

AIDS-Free World is buoyed by what is happening today. But we make no apologies for a case of faint hearts. It is important not to get carried away in the euphoria of the moment.

The fact is that so far, on paper, UN Women is simply an amalgamation of the minimally funded UN women’s programs and staff that were in place yesterday, repackaged under a new name. The opportunity still exists to use UN Women to tear down what have always seemed impenetrable barriers separating the United Nations from the world’s women. But the signs at the outset are ominous.

If the UN persists in non-transparency in the choice of an Under Secretary-General, coupled with deliberate ambiguity on funding, then the women’s agency will entrench the existing UN culture rather than transforming it. That would be a tragedy. We’ve come so far in just four years. We are determined, as AIDS-Free World, to see that UN Women, a singular achievement, is followed by one triumph after another over the United Nations’ fossilized and obdurate patriarchy.

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