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UNITED NATIONS - / www.MaximsNews.com,
UN/ - 29 October 2006 ---- After the The
High-Level Group on,
“Threats Challenges and Change”, of which I
was a member, had only one reference to Gender
in the context of trafficking. We were disappointed: the Millennium Development Goals interpreted empowerment and equality in terms of education and maternal mortality. This was and remains completely inadequate. Reproductive health and rights are of course implicit in the Goals: the Millennium Project staff and women’s organizations have spelled out how that works in practice. There are
proposals for including explicit indicators and
targets in the Goals – but so far they have
not been adopted.
The balance might still be redressed
somewhat: but why we are still struggling for
principles agreed over a decade ago? The outcomes of the United Nations sixtieth
Anniversary They have forgotten, or they have had second thoughts, about the simple
and explicit consensus of Defeating
HIV/AIDS
The
battle against HIV/AIDS offers a prime example
of what this failure means in practice. There is
no prospect for defeating the HIV/AIDS pandemic
unless the consensus of Cairo
and HIV/AIDS
is overwhelmingly a sexually transmitted
disease. Beating HIV/AIDS depends on preventing
transmission through sexual contact. Yet, at the sixtieth
Anniversary The words
“sexual health” do not appear in the final
documents of either the
sixtieth Anniversary At country level, governments, even in the most seriously-affected
countries, are still unwilling to ensure that
women can protect themselves against infection;
and that men respect their right to do so. Confronting
the facts
Twenty-five
years after the virus was first identified,
nearly 12 years after ICPD at Cairo recognised
the right to reproductive health, nearly 11
years after the Beijing women’s conference put
reproductive health and rights in the context of
equality, development and peace, we are entitled
to ask why our leaders will not act to protect
women from their increasing vulnerability to HIV
infection. My answer, in one word, is fear. It appears that our leaders are simply afraid to let women control their own sexual and reproductive health. The men
who lead governments, lead communities, manage
education and health systems and supervise
religious observance are more frightened of
women’s autonomy than they are of the HIV/AIDS
virus. This may sound like an extreme
conclusion, but I am compelled to say it. Leaders
will talk about culture, values or tradition as
the glue that holds society together: they will
speak of women as the lynchpins of the family,
and marriage as a sacred institution: but they
cannot find the courage even to discuss sexual
behaviour, let alone how to protect women’s
sexual and reproductive health. Women are the first victims of their leaders’ failure, but they will not be the last. In our time, HIV/AIDS is a real and present threat to all our societies. The only way to end the pandemic is to prevent HIV/AIDS from spreading. The only way to do that is to address the main route of transmission, which is sexual contact between men and women. And the only way to address the issue of sexual contact effectively is to empower women, all women, to make their own decisions, and provide the information and the services they need to put their decisions into practice. This
includes the adolescent as well as the adult,
the single woman as well as her married sisters,
the widow as well as the wife. For a decade,
women have had the right to reproductive health
in theory: it is time, and long past time, that
they had the right in practice. All this
requires strong leadership, at all levels. ·
Leadership
can give societies and communities the
confidence to change in healthy directions. ·
Leadership
can give women the power to protect themselves. ·
Leadership
can change the attitudes and practices of
individual men, and give men the ability to
respect their partners’ sexual health. ·
And
leadership can help remove the fear of women
that perpetuates the HIV/AIDS pandemic and
threatens development itself. I hope our leaders will find the courage they need, and
find it soon. Giving
leadership to gender
At the
international level, the United Nations has a
responsibility to give a lead. The UN system has
a variety of organizations and structures to
promote women’s empowerment and gender
equality: INSTRAW, DAW, CEDAW, OSAGI and the
Millennium Project. They all have admirable
purposes, and they all have very hard and
dedicated workers driving them along. Every
agency and programme in the United Nations
system has a department or division responsible
for gender equality; at the political level,
every committee and governing body has women’s
empowerment and gender equality as an item on
its programme. UNIFEM has done admirable work and its programme includes
some excellent examples of good practice. But it
remains small and sequestered. It has little or
no influence even in UNDP where it is lodged,
and has great difficulty in scaling-up
successful projects, even at country level. Its
position as a special fund for women actually
begs the question, which is precisely to ensure
that all
programmes and projects adequately address
gender concerns, as they affect both women and
men. What is
missing in all these structures, and all these
admirable efforts, is the leadership, dynamism
and authority to move gender issues to the head
of the development agenda. Some have
proposed a super-agency for the advancement of
women. I do not want to propose a super-agency
that will become an excuse for other parts of
the system to ignore gender issues. They have
come up with enough excuses already. The
challenge is to transform the existing
structure, to give it system-wide authority and
high-level leadership, to put women’s
empowerment and gender equality at the centre of
the work of the United Nations, not only at the
global level but at the country level as well. I think there is a place for an enhanced Monitoring, Accountability and Catalytic mechanism at the highest level in the United Nations system. It would act as a system-wide watchdog, but it should have a bite as well as a bark. It should also be a sniffer dog and a sheepdog, finding out what is going on across the system and pushing it in the right direction. It would be a catalyst, operating programmes in areas that fall in the cracks between agencies, like violence against women years ago or gender budgets, or to demonstrate the effectiveness of gendered approaches, such as linking gender, poverty and environment. And it would be a normative, standard-setting organization. It would sniff out good practices and push laggards into line. It would hold agencies and programmes accountable for gender mainstreaming and encourage the scaling up of effective gender programmes. It would be enabled to be an equal partner at all levels of decision-making from country, regional to the international. It would demand that agencies, funds and programmes indeed all departments, themselves have the internal mechanisms for gender mainstreaming, and that each governing body sets and monitors its own standards. It would act with the authority of the
Secretary-General; it would have its own
funding, and it would have the support of all
executive boards and governing bodies across the
system. My idea would be initially to merge all the existing mechanisms – OSAGI, DAW, INSTRAW, UNIFEM – and these would form the building blocks for the establishment of a Centre for Women’s Empowerment and Gender Equality, with an Executive Director at the Under-Secretary level reporting directly to the Secretary-General. Over
time, resources (both dollars and people) would
have to expand to implement its broad mandate of
programme leadership on gender equality and
accountability for gender mainstreaming
throughout the UN system. The
Executive Director would be a member ex
officio of all executive boards and
governing bodies, peace-building commission, and
human rights council. She would report to
the ECOSOC, to the Second and Third Committees
of the General Assembly dealing with economic
and social, humanitarian or human rights
affairs. The Centre would service CEDAW and CSW (unless CEDAW is transferred to Human Rights). If member
states determine she would be also a member of
the CEB and play a similar in the entire UN
system. The Executive Director would exercise oversight of gender mainstreaming, both in development funds and programmes, and in all the operations of the Secretariat such as human rights and peacekeeping. She will have to be an experienced
women’s rights advocate, a charismatic leader,
with powers of persuasion equal to her task. I
don’t think we only need a one-woman band
beating the drum for gender mainstreaming; what
we need is someone who can conduct the
orchestra, and bring out the theme of gender
equality that should run throughout the work of
the United Nations. To make
gender equality a reality rather than simply a
rhetorical phrase, the
Centre’s terms of reference will have to be
very carefully structured: to ensure that the
gender concerns of both women and men are
adequately represented in consensus agreements
and working documents; to demonstrate, encourage
and promote good practice in the various funds
and programmes at the operational level, and
ensure that gender issues and good practices are
identified, supported and scaled-up
appropriately; to monitor and evaluate gender
mainstreaming in the work of the Secretariat,
and to report to the Secretary-General annually,
perhaps in the form of a scorecard or a State
of the World’s Women Report. All this
will cost money of course, but the existing
bodies already have funding from the regular
budget. We will identify additional streams of
regular, consistent and independent
funding, including additional funding from the
international community.
The return on even a modest increased
investment will undoubtedly be high.
As Secretary-General Kofi Annan
frequently notes, “the empowerment of women is
the most effective development tool”. Great
care will be needed to ensure that the Centre is
not seen as an alternative to action by the
existing mechanisms of the United Nations.
Experience has shown us how that happens,
especially with sensitive issues: once a
separate programme is set up, the rest of the
system assumes the problem is solved and
proceeds to ignore the issue or give it token
attention. Our Centre would have precisely the
opposite task – to insist that all parts of
the system give gender equality its proper place
in their work. The Executive Director will be the principal advocate within the United Nations system for women’s empowerment and gender equality; but she will also ensure that everyone in the system becomes an advocate too. Understanding the
nature of gender mainstreaming will do a great
deal at all levels to remove the stigma and
prejudice – the fear of women – that has
returned like a bad dream to threaten our
future. Our leaders need to know that their
courage will have its just reward. Such a
structure as I am suggesting will help to
reassure them. The
United Nations Centre for Women’s Empowerment
and Gender Equality will encourage open and
honest dialogue at the international level. In
time, it will restore the lost impetus of Cairo
and Beijing.
Most important, it will give the necessary
impetus to institutions and individuals at
national level to confront the daily realities
of women’s lives, and change them. I look forward to the rest of our discussion. ~~~~~~ MaximsNews.com, An Independent Voice from the U.N., provides commentary and analysis from leading world figures: King Abdullah II (Jordan), HRH Prince Zeid Ra'ad Zeid Al-Hussein (Jordan), Sir Brian Urquhart, Hans Blix, Amb. Richard Holbrooke, Anwar Ibrahim, Bianca Jagger, Dr. Nafis Sadik, Shashi Tharoor, Thoraya Ahmed Obaid, Noeleen Heyzer, Kerry Kennedy, Ian Williams, Stephen Schlesinger, Sen. Timothy E. Wirth, Marc Morial, Amb. Jayantha Dhanapala (Sri Lanka), Amb. Pierre Schori (Sweden), Amb. William H. Luers, Mehri Madarshahi, J. Michael Adams, Gloria Feldt, Jeffrey Laurenti, Rodney D. Smith, Rory O'Connor, Genevieve Stamper, Max Stamper and others.
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