Ms Saraswathi Menon:

It is a great honour to address the committee on behalf of UN Women. The full name of my organisation is the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment. I am grateful to Oxfam for its campaign, ending poverty starts with women, because that is the reason I am here. UN Women is the newest agency in the United Nations system. We were created because the United Nations recognises that what it has done over the past 60 years of its existence has not been sufficient. That can also be said for many of the governments that comprise the UN.

Progress has been made in some areas. In 1946, the Commission on the Status of Women was established under the aegis of the UN. The commission continues to meet annually to monitor the implementation of governmental commitments. In 1979, as an outcome of the commission’s work, governments adopted the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination against Women, which provides the framework of rights for women against which we measure all our work. There has also been a series of international conferences, the last of which was held in Beijing. The Beijing platform for action outlines what needs to be done to advance women’s rights and gender equality.

However, within the UN system we recognise that we have been fragmented. All UN agencies have worked on these issues but the results are not commensurate with the effort. This is why member states decided in 2010 to create UN Women by pulling together four distinct existing entities, namely, the division for advancement of women, INSTRAW, UNIFEM and OSAGI, which monitored internal UN efforts to achieve gender balance and women’s rights. The General Assembly asked us to continue the good work of these agencies but to do it differently. We were asked to combine what we do at the intergovernmental, normative level in terms of setting standards that governments apply to their own work with what is happening on the ground in terms of programmatic work. UN Women was given a clear universal mandate so that, unlike many development agencies which work solely in developing countries, we work all over the world to provide programmatic support to developing countries and policy advice to developed countries, as we did last year when the Council of Europe was developing the Convention on Preventing and Combating Violence against Women.

One of the purposes of building on these achievements was to enable UN Women to catalyse more effective work within the UN system. We were not created to replace the work of other UN agencies but to help them do better. We do not implement huge programmes at country level, although we are expanding our country presence, but rather we work through the UN resident co-ordinator system to support the co-ordinator and other UN agencies in becoming more effective on the ground. Our programmes are designed to be catalytic in order that national governments as well as UN agencies can build on them and make them sustainable in so far as development and women’s rights are concerned.

We carry out a number of global programmes which we try to make as collaborative as possible. We do not have unique programmes but, for example, work with FAO, IFAD and WFP on a programme for rural women, primarily in Africa but also in other regions. We are also working with the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights and UNDP on a global programme of access to justice, and the UN statistical division, the World Bank, and the OECD on a programme to improve indicators and data on gender equality in order that they can be standardised for the entire world through the statistical commission.

Our funding reflects this unique mandate. We receive funding from the regular assessed budget of the United Nations as well as voluntary contributions. The OECD countries are our primary donors but many developing countries, such as the United Arab Emirates and the Dominican Republic, also provide regular annual support to our core budget. We are particularly grateful to Ireland as one of the leaders of the system-wide coherence effort within the UN, of which UN Women is one of the first children. In terms of funding, Ireland has also supported UN Women from its early years and has increased its contributions over time.

UN Women was established in recognition of the great disparities that exist for women worldwide. This is perhaps most starkly evident in developing countries, but it is true not only of them. Violence against women is a universal phenomenon that affects countries at all levels of income regardless of whether they suffer from conflict. Inequality in the distribution of resources, rights and responsibilities affects the lives of many. In the case of women, the structural basis of gender inequality compounds poverty, deprivation and discrimination. I wish to highlight a case which we have all been following over the last month. Malala Yousafzai is a 14 year old Pakistani girl who tried to claim the right to education and was attacked for it. For every 100 boys out of school worldwide, 122 girls are out of school. In many countries the situation is far worse. Ireland has kept gender equality as a central concern in its engagement with Europe and countries in the developing world. We commend it on this commitment and admire the fact that it brings its priorities together. Addressing hunger is one of Ireland’s priorities and, therefore, the issue of women in rural areas has also become a priority. If we work together we can make a big difference because rural women produce more than 55% of all food grown in developing countries and, once again, we are facing hunger problems and a spiralling food crisis.

Our priorities involve expanding the voice of women and their contribution to their own and their communities’ well-being.

We work on the issues of political participation and leadership, economic empowerment, women's role in peace building and gender responsive budgeting and planning. We recently joined the UNAIDS partnership as a co-sponsor and also play a key role in the Secretary General's Age Four Plus and Education First initiatives in an attempt to try to influence what the United Nations is doing in various areas.

I will not give specific examples of our work, but I hope we will have an opportunity to discuss it further. I would like to finish with a few remarks on the future and what we could do together. We know Ireland has played a lead role in influencing other countries on the issue of gender equality and in terms of its own commitment in its work. We look forward to a partnership with Ireland that can build on the past but also transform what we want to achieve in the future. We have several opportunities. We have the opportunity in the post-Rio conference period where sustainable development will be central to the agendas of all countries. We will have the post-2015 development agenda and have the intersection of the two with the definition of sustainable development goals. We are looking to the leadership of Ireland in ensuring these future frameworks will address the structural issues of gender inequality to transform everyone's life. We believe - this is something the United Nations has been saying for the past few months - that it is important that any future framework is underpinned by human rights, equality and sustainability and that it is developed in consultation with many interests. I look forward to today's engagement and I am grateful for the invitation extended to me.