The Wellspring

International Women’s Day 2007 was celebrated on 8 March with the theme “Ending Impunity for Violence against Women and Girls”. It also marked the culmination of an effort to implement a proposal for the creation of a new UN women’s agency.

Late last year, the United Nations High-level Panel on System-wide Coherence handed down its report recommending that the UN Development Fund for Women, the UN Division for the Advancement of Women, and the Office of the Special Adviser on Gender Issues be combined into one ambitiously-funded agency. The combined budgets of the three units is currently less than $80 million annually.

In late February this year, a coalition of over 150 international NGOs represented at the UN Commission on the Status of Women urged UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to implement the proposal.

On International Women’s Day, Ban came out in support of the idea, saying that the UN should create a new agency to focus exclusively on promoting women’s rights and well-being,

“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 realize gender equality worldwide,” Ban said. “It should mobilize forces of change at the global level and inspire enhanced results at the country level.”

Update (20 March): On a related note: to help commemorate International Women’s Day, UN Non-Government Liaison Service released the latest in the Development Dossier series, which analyses and discusses major issues on the international development agenda. The Unfinished Story of Women and the United Nations covers more than eighty-five years of history between women and inter-governmental organizations. The book recalls the success story of women and the League of Nations and describes the unfolding history of women at the United Nations for the advancement and empowerment of women, especially in the 30 years since the First UN World Conference on Women in 1975 in Mexico City and up to the ten-year review and appraisal of the implementation of the Beijing Platform for Action in 2005.

The Unfinished Story of Women and the United Nations is available at http://www.un-ngls.org/pdf/UnfinishedStory.pdf.