As you know, 2025 is a year of milestones.
Five years to deliver on the promise of the Sustainable Development Goals [SDGs], with SDG5 at its heart.
25 years since UN Security Council resolution 1325 on women, peace, and security, demanding bold action for the 600 million women and girls living in crisis-affected areas. Although they are often the first victims of conflict, they are always, without exception, our greatest hope for peace, security, and recovery.
30 years since the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action—30 years of progress we proudly celebrate, from stronger domestic violence laws to the rise of youth-led feminism and activism. But the job is far from complete.
The Beijing+30 Action Agenda offers a roadmap, built on your national reports and the six sub-themes of the Secretary-General’s report. We know what must be done, and it’s well within our reach:
- First, bridge the digital gap.
- Second, address poverty, including through social protection.
- Third, end violence against women and girls.
- Fourth, advance women’s leadership and decision-making.
- Fifth, advance women, peace, and security commitments; and
- Sixth, prioritize women and girls in climate justice.
Across these six areas, we have a critical cross-cutting “plus one”: to meaningfully engage young women and girls, the architects of both today and tomorrow.
In our strive for a gender equal world, we must follow this roadmap, for ALL women and girls. Empowering them is key for overcoming today’s many complex challenges.
You will hear these themes many times over this year: at CSW69, at UNGA80, and beyond.
Together, we will demand bold, actionable, and well-resourced commitments to close the gender equality gap and to fulfil our promises.
This year also marks 15 years since the General Assembly established UN Women through resolution 64/289, entrusting us with the mandate to drive gender equality and ensure the world reaps its long-overdue benefits.
We turn 15 in a vastly different operating environment to our establishment, one where multilateral action on the rights and empowerment of women and girls has grown increasingly complex. Development finance continues to decline, while earmarking rises.
In 2024, UN Women’s resourcing underscored the acceleration of these trends, signalling a long-term trajectory of non-core outweighing core resources.
The fact is that in the last two to three years, over half of UN Women’s top twenty core donors have shifted their development policy in ways that weaken support for the UN and for our agency. Some of these adverse impacts are already felt; others we anticipate shortly. While UN Women has been somewhat protected, we are not immune to these trends. For us to fulfil our mandate, it is critical we have the means to reach the women and girls we serve.
With resolution 64/289, our founding resolution, Member States gave us a mandate, supported by Strategic Plans and carefully reviewed Integrated Budgets, to ensure its implementation.
As demand grows and funding declines, I must stress: we cannot do more with less. We have always valued the friendship of our Board, but now more than ever, I ask for a financial commitment that matches this valuable friendship.
As always, we continue to achieve the best possible results with the resources you entrust to us, across our regional offices and our country presences.
This has always been, and will always be, our commitment. And I will remain steadfast in making every dollar count to drive meaningful impact. Given our constrained financial situation, we are taking the necessary steps: containing costs and anchoring our work in our founding resolution and the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, as well as other key intergovernmental standards.
In the spirit of operational excellence, I would like to update you on the “pivot to the country and regions”. It is a process that I know many of you are following closely. The pivot is about strengthening our delivery of results on the ground, where women and girls are, and leveraging our triple mandate at the regional and country levels to achieve that.
It is about ensuring there is a clear thread between our crucial global normative work—in New York or elsewhere—and real, tangible changes in the lives of the women and girls we serve.
As you know, we are focusing our budget, prioritizing the country level, and empowering our Representatives and Regional Directors with greater authority. We are also moving some 190 positions from New York to Nairobi and Bonn, where we can be closer to the women and girls we serve and leverage cost efficiencies. Premises are secured in Nairobi and Bonn and will be ready by this July. We expect to save a minimum of USD 8 million a year once the changes are completed—saving an average of USD 52,000 per year in Bonn, and USD 32,000 in Nairobi for each international position we move.
Costs such as rent and security will fall by over two-thirds—from USD 14,000 to USD 4,000 per post—and we anticipate further savings in travel. Perhaps most importantly, these are positions being moved closer to the people we serve, so that they, our people, can serve better.
I know very well that these post relocations are inevitably unsettling and disruptive for some of our workforce, just as they have been for our peers who have undertaken similar processes. I fully appreciate that, and I commend our workforce for the spirit with which they are approaching this. We are also grateful for our Staff Council for its excellent support in making these changes work as best they can for everyone who works for UN Women and for being a key part of our extensive consultations.
We are working with each individual staff member to discuss how their personal situations fit with these changes. Our aim is to make this transition as smooth and successful as possible for our work and our workforce, our people, because, ultimately, our impact is only made possible thanks to our people.