Baby Steps (On a Long Road Ahead)

One week ago, on July 2nd, the U.N. General Assembly voted unanimously to create a new agency dedicated to championing the rights of women and girls across the globe – UN Women.

In my opinion, this is great news - and long overdue!

While UN Women is not a completely new animal – it merges existing UN gender issue entities, it has been hailed by Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon as a “major step forward.”

Most notably, it provides increased funding to women with a budget projected at $500 million (according to Paula Donovan, co-director of AIDS Free World and interviewee on Voice of America, this is double what UN agencies focused on women have been given in the past). The other notable difference is that the head of UN Women will be an undersecretary-general – a much higher rank than the head of UNIFEM – which sent out a celebratory note announcing this step forward to members of its Say No - UNiTE to End Violence Against Women” campaign this week.

According to an article in The New York Times (which mostly focuses on the poor choice of the group’s moniker), “the basic idea behind U.N. Women is to pull together four small, fragmented agencies that worked on women’s issues, with much duplication. By reconstituting the agencies into a single entity, member nations are hoping the organization will provide the United Nations with more clout in addressing women’s problems.”

I really hope that this organization is able to move beyond policy measures to affect action on the ground. I also hope it sheds greater light on the grave issues affecting women around the world (limited rights, no access to education, genital mutilation, child marriage, sex-trafficking - need I go on?). Not enough people are aware of these issues. Case in point: I was recently at a party and told someone I had a women's rights blog and was met with "women already have enough rights!" as a response. I understood this response too. As women gain a stronger foothold in the US job market, "women's rights" seems like a played out cause - but it's not. Just read The New York Times, Human Rights Watch, Women's eNews - there are women out there that need our help attaining very basic rights - and the first step is awareness of their plight. I hope UN Women brings awareness to this issue.

What do you think?