Speech: We maintain an unerring focus on our mission: to advance the voice and empowerment of all women and girls, in all their diversity, everywhere

My congratulations also to the other newly elected Members of the Bureau: Vice-President, H.E. Mrs. Suela Janina (Ambassador and Permanent Representative of Albania); Vice-President, H.E. Mrs. Sophie de Smedt (Ambassador and Permanent Representative of Belgium); and Vice-President, H.E. Mrs. Aida Kasymalieva (Ambassador and Permanent Representative of Kyrgyzstan).

I thank you in advance for all you will do: the Board meetings, the informal briefings that you will chair and the crucial support that your delegations will provide in decision-making and in reaching consensus—as we have always done in this august Board.

Allow me also to extend my fullest appreciation to H.E. Ms. Nicola Clase, Ambassador and Permanent Representative of Sweden, who so ably led us last year. Thank you from us all, Madame Ambassador.

And, thank you to all our 2025 Vice-Presidents of the Bureau, the representatives of Antigua and Barbuda, Albania, Japan, and Uganda.

And, I extend the warmest of welcomes to our very special guest at this session, Her Highness Sheikha Hessa bint Khalifa al Khalifa of Bahrain. You honour us with your presence.

The Executive Board is our primary forum to engage Member States and seek your guidance and support in our shared efforts for gender equality and women’s empowerment. Your role in 2026 will be more important than ever.

Our essential work plays out in a world ever-more shaken by crisis, uncertainty, and realignment. One where the historical truth of women and girls suffering first and suffering most plays out with grim consistency.

Today, over 676 million women and girls live within 50 kilometres of deadly conflict, the highest number recorded since the 1990s. It is women and girls who bear the brunt of conflict, climate shocks, economic instability, and political uncertainty.

This is true from Afghanistan to Gaza, Haiti, Myanmar, the Sahel, South Sudan, Sudan, Ukraine, Yemen, and beyond.

UN Women has established itself as a crucial and recognized actor in these crises. We contribute to efforts in the humanitarian, development, and peacebuilding spheres, working particularly closely with civil society.

As a member of the IASC [Inter-Agency Standing Committee], we work with the United Nations and civil society to ensure women’s voices inform humanitarian response.

In Afghanistan, Sudan, and Syria, women’s advisory groups to the humanitarian country team have strengthened women’s leadership, improved accountability, and led to more gender-responsive humanitarian action.

Across conflict and transition contexts, we are engaging women peacebuilders, highlighting their leadership and their voice. They broker local ceasefires, humanitarian access, and, we know, where women lead, peace follows.

I am as proud of the UN Women staff who deliver tirelessly in these most difficult of circumstances as I am of their achieved results.

Our agenda for this session is weighty.

We will discuss audit. I hope you will share my satisfaction in our 14th consecutive unqualified audit opinion from the UN Board of Auditors, and our fifth consecutive year of zero long-outstanding recommendations from the UN Board of Auditors.

We will also share our progress on internal controls and embedding enterprise risk management across the organization. You will see our focus on organizational effectiveness and efficiency is undimmed.

We will discuss the JIU [Joint Inspection Unit] review on governance and oversight of the Executive Boards. I look forward to your guidance as always as we work to strengthen even further our governance arrangements.

Let me take the opportunity to thank again the JIU Working Group for their work.

We will discuss organizational culture and racial discrimination, critical areas to build an enabling environment of a motivated workforce. It remains a prerequisite for our credibility as a global champion for gender equality and women’s rights. We look forward to your guidance here also.

Under the item on HIV/ AIDS we will share an update on our contribution in the context of severe funding cuts to the sector. They take place alongside ongoing vulnerability of women and girls, who risk suffering a potential 10 million new infections without urgent action.

And we will discuss UN80 in all its aspects. This includes the work package on the proposal of the potential merger of UN Women and UNFPA and the ongoing assessment process.

We will continue our tradition in this Board of active and transparent engagement, honest dialogue, and genuine partnership.

Together, we can and must drive forward our crucial triple mandate and our work in all its aspects.

The outcome of UN80, which will ultimately be your decision as Member States, must deliver strongly for women and girls.

We pursue our fundamental mandate in the face of ever greater headwinds and intensified backlash. Political spaces polarized, sometimes to the point of profound dysfunction. Precipitous funding declines, including for women’s organizations and those working for gender equality. Civic space shrunk further.

Yet, UN Women continues to deliver, as you have tasked us to do, undaunted, undeterred, in lock step with our crucial civil society and women’s rights partners, and in harmony with your national priorities and aspirations. That was truer in 2025 than ever before.

We delivered in Somalia, where UN Women’s support contributed to the adoption of a 30 per cent women’s quota in the Electoral Law.

We delivered in Afghanistan, where our coordination and advocacy as co-lead of the Gender in Humanitarian Action Working Group helped drive a twenty-fold increase in the funding of the Afghanistan Humanitarian Fund to women-led organizations. Up from USD 250,000 in 2023 to USD 5.07 million. This is transformative and life-saving.

We delivered in the Arab States region on women, peace and security. UN Women supported the development, implementation, and monitoring of WPS National Action Plans in Egypt, in Iraq, in Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, Morocco, and Tunisia, ensuring they remained flexible, localized, and aligned with emerging priorities.

We delivered in Europe and in Central Asia, working closely with national and local governments to deliver institutionalization of gender-responsive budgets in Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo [under UNSCR 1244], North Macedonia, and Serbia.

We delivered in the Latin America and the Caribbean region, where we supported 22 countries to develop care-related laws and policies, including legislation establishing formal care systems and legislative projects on care.

We delivered on our coordination mandate, supporting 23 UN Country Teams and Resident Coordinators to establish their Cooperation Frameworks on country gender equality profiles. Another 20 are planned for 2026.

As the Office of the Focal Point for Women in the United Nations, we saw women reach 50.7 per cent of staff in the UN system in the Professional and higher categories in 2025.

There is now sustained parity in the Senior Management Group, among Resident Coordinators, and at headquarters.

We look forward to building on the coordination momentum also through the Gender Equality Acceleration Plan, as we push forward, together as a coordinated UN system, to deliver more for women and girls, from the country to the regional and to the global level.

And we also delivered results through our normative role, supporting 48 countries across six regions to collect care-related data for normative and policy frameworks.

And, as you saw last year, we advanced the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action through catalysing more than 110 Member State commitments under the Beijing Action Agenda.

The credit for these achievements is shared with you, our Board. I also acknowledge with appreciation our development partners.

Last year, UN Women’s resources saw a reduction of less than 11 per cent from 2024, a markedly smaller reduction than for global ODA.

We know our friends and allies among our donors work hard to protect UN Women in the face of dramatic reductions across the board. And we know this reflects a wide-ranging protection of investments in gender equality. We thank you for that.

We will need every resource possible to rise to the demands of 2026, as we begin to implement our new Strategic Plan.

We will take the momentum from the Beijing action plans to the first year of implementation of our Strategic Plan. Our shared ambition is greater impact at scale, greater accountability, bigger, better results. All delivered with ever greater efficiency.

This includes our pivot to the field, which will see one third of our workforce moved to Bonn and Nairobi by the end of the year, as planned. We already see cost savings and improved connectedness to the country level.

And this year we will place particular emphasis on building UN Women’s role as thought leader. The 10th Progress of the World’s Women report, our flagship report, will focus on gender equality and climate change.

It will build on the new gender action plan agreed at last year’s COP 30 meeting in Brazil, showcase our new gender equality and climate policy scorecard, and serve as an input to COP31 in Türkiye.

And next month, the 70th Commission on the Status of Women (CSW70) will focus on access to justice for women and girls, with International Women’s Day sharing the theme of “Rights. Justice. Action. For All Women and Girls”.

I ask you all to play your fullest part in seizing this opportunity to mobilize political will. Justice is the foundation of rights. Yet women and girls do not enjoy equal protection under the law in any country. And globally, women have only 64 per cent of the legal rights of men.

There are few issues more deserving than access to justice of the Commission’s attention. It is a worthy focus for its first session since the adoption of the resolution on its revitalization.

2026 will also see Member States choose a new Secretary-General. I know that the imperatives of gender equality and the power of women’s leadership will be prominent in your thoughts as you make your decisions.

It falls upon us all to nurture our mandate through a complex period. We do so from a position of strength. These last 15 years of partnership between UN Women and our Board have afforded us the best of foundations.

We maintain an unerring focus on our mission: to advance the voice and empowerment of all women and girls, in their diversity, everywhere.

UN Women’s advocacy and reach continue to grow, and our brand is recognized as being uncompromising in the pursuit of equality.

In the headwinds of funding cuts, of backlash, and more, our mandate, given to us by you, Member States, remains the single most comprehensive mandate in the United Nations system to deliver on gender equality and women’s rights, through our impact on the ground, through our coordination efforts, and through our normative and policy work.

It will always serve as the unshakeable ground on which we stand. And we stand there alongside our partners, none closer than you, our Board.

Our pride in this Entity is not complacency, nor our optimism imprudence. It is confidence. And rightly so. We have achieved so much, and I am confident that 2026 will see us achieve much more—together.

I look forward to the deliberations of this session.

And I thank you.