Speech: A powerful source of hope – Equality solves, it mends, it works

Speech

UN Under-Secretary General and UN Women Executive Director Sima Bahous delivers opening remarks at the second regular session 2025 of the UN Women Executive Board, UN headquarters, 9 September 2025. Photo: UN Women/Ryan Brown.

My thanks also to our Vice-Presidents of the Bureau: H.E. Ms. Suela Janina, Ambassador and Permanent Representative of Albania; H.E. Mr. Walton Webson, Ambassador and Permanent Representative of Antigua and Barbuda; H.E. Mr. Umetsu Shigeru, Ambassador and Deputy Permanent Representative of Japan; and H.E Mr. Godfrey Kwoba, Ambassador and Deputy Permanent Representative of Uganda. I thank them all for their skilful facilitation and guidance. Neither I nor my team take for granted the excellent collaboration we enjoy with our Board. We are modelling the spirit of partnership, honest dialogue and commitment that the multilateral system demands.

UN Women is both the child of UN reform and its standard bearer. Our 15 years have seen us, together with you, our Board, animate a truly transformative mandate, integrating normative, coordination, and operational elements synergetically. Through it, together, we have delivered powerful results for women and girls.

You saw this during the Board's field visit to Zimbabwe earlier this year, and in field visits in prior years. Whether in development, humanitarian, conflict, or increasingly nexus contexts, you witnessed UN Women staff working alongside government, civil society, and the UN system for women's economic empowerment, tackling gender-based violence, and building climate resilience.

We cannot meet here without acknowledging the reality for women and girls in crisis situations. War denies countless women's and girls' safety, opportunity and a decent and dignified life. Mass displacement, loss of livelihoods, and the collapse of essential services force women into unsafe survival strategies, with soaring rates of malnutrition, maternal risks, and increased violence.

In Afghanistan, four years after the Taliban takeover, the repudiation of everything our work represents continues. Women and girls are facing the recent earthquakes' devastating consequences with limited support. Women are devalued, commodified, and erased from public life.

Seven in ten women and girls killed in conflict last year were killed in Gaza. And a few weeks ago, the IPC [Integrated Food Security Phase Classification] declared famine in Gaza city-for the first time in the Middle East. Women and girls in Gaza face a devastating daily reality of suffering, death, hunger, and displacement in their pursuit of safety, dignity, and the basic necessities of life both for themselves and for those they care for.

In Sudan, 5.8 million women and girls are internally displaced. The protracted famine there has disproportionately affected women and girls.

Over 12 million women and girls, and increasingly men and boys, are at risk of gender-based violence, more than triple in just two years.

In Ukraine, over three years into the war, 1.8 million women and girls are displaced. Women-owned businesses are losing income, women are spending more time on unpaid care work, and gender-based violence has tripled since the start of the war.

I hear similar stories, each with their own grim specificities, wherever war is waged or conflict is pursued, be it Haiti, Myanmar, Yemen, and beyond.

Across these conflicts, UN Women is present, unwavering. Not just because women and girls need us, but because they are the solution-makers, the indispensable rebuilders. They are the foundation of sustainable peace. This is at the heart of Security Council Resolution 1325, the 25th anniversary of which we mark in this year of anniversaries.

As member of the IASC [Inter-Agency Standing Committee], UN Women engages with the humanitarian system to place gender at the heart of the humanitarian reset.

In 2024, we provided gender expertise to more than three-quarters of the humanitarian cluster systems; we reached 5.3 million crisis-affected people indirectly, and 1.1 million directly in countries including Afghanistan, DRC, Palestine, Sudan, and Ukraine; and we supported more than 1,200 women-led organizations working in crisis across crisis situations.

We have five short years to deliver on the 2030 Agenda. We all recognize that SDG 5 on gender equality is a prerequisite for peace, for security, and for all sustainable development. Our forthcoming SDG Gender Snapshot report, to be launched next week, tells us what is possible when we invest in women and girls.

In just the last five years, 99 new or reformed laws across the world advanced women's rights. Rates of intimate partner violence are 2.5 times lower in countries with comprehensive legal and policy measures on preventing gender-based violence. In just the last 10 years, women's leadership in climate negotiations has more than doubled.

In 2015, women occupied less than 1 in 10 seats in climate talks. Last year, it was almost 1 in 4, better, but still far from parity.

The High-Level Meeting on Beijing+30 during UNGA80 will offer a moment to take stock and redouble our efforts for women and girls. Nothing less will suffice. Member States, in your national reports, you have made clear the blueprint going forward. It is grounded in the 12 critical areas of concern from the Beijing Platform for Action.

From your national and regional reports, we have derived six priority areas for accelerated implementation: freedom from poverty, zero violence, equal power and leadership, climate justice, peace and security, and full participation in the digital revolution. Cutting across all, amplifying the voices of young women and girls.

Our 2025 SDG Gender Snapshot report also shows just how far that progress can go, for example, if we choose to make concrete investments in just two Action Areas of the Beijing+30 Action Agenda: closing the digital divide and ending poverty through comprehensive investments in care and emerging economies.

By closing the digital divide, 30 million women and girls could exit extreme poverty by 2050. And we would drive generational gains with USD 1.5 trillion in GDP generated by 2030-and over USD 100 trillion cumulatively by 2050.

By accelerating action on investing in care, education, green economy, labour markets, and social protection, we could reduce the number of women and girls in extreme poverty by 110 million by 2050, unlocking USD 342 trillion in cumulative economic returns.

These are the returns on investment in women and girls that benefit us all-and that we should not waste.

I am pleased to note that more than 80 Member States have already submitted over 130 priority actions to the Beijing+30 Action Agenda.

I look forward to welcoming you all on 22 September, to hear these commitments, and to working with you, as always, in making the ambitions of the Beijing Declaration a reality for all women and girls, everywhere.

I welcome the adoption of the agenda and workplan for this session, and your consideration of the provisional agenda for our first regular session in 2026.

I also look forward to your decision on our new Strategic Plan for 2026-2029. It comes from the most extensive consultative processes undertaken to date for a UN Women Strategic Plan: four informals, a workshop, our discussions in June both formal and informal, a global survey of stakeholders, dialogues with civil society, consultations with UN entities and with private sector partners, and more.

The plan reflects all this. We have listened, we have reflected, and we have incorporated.

Your guidance has been clear: focus, prioritize, and demonstrate UN Women's unique added value around its triple mandate.

That is what we have done, anchoring our triple mandate-especially our normative leadership, as you have underscored-along with system-wide coordination and operational delivery, as our comparative and defining collaborative strength.

We have made tough decisions to bring more focus, mindful that resources are ever more scarce.

Seven cross-cutting outcomes in the previous plan have become three:

• protecting and advancing normative frameworks, laws and policies;
• strengthening institutional accountability through financing, robust data, and practices that advance gender equality; and
• expanding women's agency and ensuring their access to services, resources, and opportunities to lead, decide, and thrive.

We retain the four priority thematic areas our stakeholders look to us to support:

• women's leadership and decision-making;
• women's economic empowerment in resilient economies;
• ending violence against women and girls; and
• women, peace, security and humanitarian action.

We strengthen our focus on partnerships, revitalizing our UN system coordination offering deepening collaborations with government, women's machineries, women-led organizations and movements, the private sector, men and boys, and young people, focusing always on impact, not just on activities.

We further strengthen our capacity through results-based management, transparency, and linking resources and results, as well as in leading-edge areas such as data, innovation, technology, strategic foresight, and more.

We will be fit-for-purpose to deliver this Plan in a fast-changing world. Our work on communication and advocacy will reinforce our leading voice and influence to advance women's rights and gender equality.

Our flagship effectiveness and efficiency initiative, the pivot to regions and countries, is now fully underway. It will deliver greater impact through proximity to those we serve and those we work with, alongside value for money through leveraging more cost-effective duty stations. Again, this all reflects your guidance.

This Strategic Plan deserves a sound financial foundation. The Integrated Budget 2026-2027, reflecting the guidance of the Advisory Committee on Administrative and Budgetary Questions, establishes realistic, prudent income projections given the funding challenges the UN and others face. It proposes total estimated voluntary contributions of USD 1.05 billion, a USD 50 million reduction in regular resources and USD 70 million increase in other resources, compared to its predecessor. It includes an institutional budget of USD 202.4 million, USD 2 million less than 2024-2025. 87.3 per cent of total estimated resources are for development and humanitarian activities.

It is opportune to consider the Integrated Budget alongside our regular Structured Dialogue on Financing. It is crucial that we are all aligned on UN Women's financing as the necessary prerequisite for results, including the crucial role of regular resources, multi-year funding, and predictable and flexible other resources.

We will work together with you to continue to diversify the funding base, to strengthen partnerships, and to make the case for investing in women and girls. We will also continue our discussion on the JIU [Joint Inspection Unit] review of governance and oversight.

I believe our commitment to working with our Board and all aspects of our governance is unambiguous and clear. We look forward to collaborating with the working group and this Board to ensure accountability and effectiveness.

From Beijing+30 to UN80, from the Strategic Plan to the structured dialogue on financing, we are laying the foundations of a stronger, ever-better UN Women and, through us, a better UN system. Our collaboration, your guidance, give us much to look forward to.

This collaboration plays out in, arguably, the most complex multilateral space in at least a generation. I am mindful of that. It is precisely for such times that the multilateral system was created, the UN Charter and its call for equality drafted, and the United Nations constructed. We make the world better, rise to its shared challenges, only together.

That is why we are fully engaged with the Secretary-General's UN80 initiative.

We remain the system's leading voice for a reformed UN that navigates this difficult context to the benefit of women and girls; and for a strong entity for gender equality, that advances the rights, agency, and empowerment of women and girls across all the work of the UN system.

Through our co-chairing of the Development Cluster of UN80, UN Women also supports UN system-wide thinking on concrete proposals for reform, streamlining, and efficiencies.

Gender equality always was, always will be a powerful source of hope.

That is why UN Women's message is unwavering: it is long overdue but never too late to seize the rewards of gender equality, a world where women, men, girls, and boys stand together as equals to heal our planet, our nations, our communities. The data are unambiguous. Equality solves. It mends. It works. There is neither challenge nor crisis that is not improved by equality, from our climate to our wars to our economies.

The opportunities are truly immeasurable.

That is why I am honoured to continue to serve as UN Women's Executive Director. UN Women's mandate is more crucial than ever. My commitment to it remains unwavering. I have promised you a more accountable, transparent, and impactful UN Women, not least in the crisis contexts that rightly preoccupy Member States. I believe that is what I have delivered and will continue to deliver. That has been possible because of your strong support. And I am clear that it is, at its heart, thanks to the extraordinary team of professionals it is my privilege to lead. With this Board, this team, this new Strategic Plan, I could not ask for a better foundation for my second term, working together with you to take the mandate you afforded us even further.

I look forward to standing with all of you as we go into our new Strategic Plan and thank you, in anticipation of the work that we will continue to do together.