PROFILE: UNIFEM Advocates Women’s Causes

By Thalif Deen Reprint | | Print |

Thalif Deen

UNITED NATIONS, Jan 31 2000 (IPS) - The UN Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM), which has existed as an autonomous body since 1984, is asserting itself as a vigorous advocate of women’s causes.

“The challenges of the 21st century will require leadership that can provide alternative visions, values and strategies to create a more humane world,” says UNIFEM Executive Director Noeleen Heyzer.

“And women’s leadership is emerging to fill that need,” she adds, pointing out that UNIFEM’s support for women’s leadership development has evolved and expanded in recent years.

Originally an integral part of the UN Development Programme (UNDP), UNIFEM was made a separate autonomous body by a General Assembly resolution in December 1984.

Since then, UNIFEM has focused on three thematic areas: strengthening women’s economic capacity; engendering governance and leadership; and promoting women’s rights to eliminate all forms of gender violence.

“We also became a resource and knowledge provider on women’s empowerment and gender mainstreaming for UN development assistance,” Heyzer notes.

UNIFEM’s impact is being felt in several fields, including politics, business, human rights, conflict-resolution and even criminal justice.

At the July 1998 Rome conference to establish an International Criminal Court (ICC), UNIFEM provided support to the Women’s Caucus for Gender Justice, an international coalition which focused specifically on gender-related issues in war and armed conflict.

“The involvement of women in the negotiations leading to the drafting of the statute for ICC was critical in ensuring that gender-specific concerns were included in the document,” says Heyzer.

The Women’s Caucus was also responsible for the inclusion of critical provisions regarding rape, forced pregnancy and sexual slavery in the ICC statute.

The ICC statute is considered a model for gender justice in its codification of crimes of sexual, reproductive and gender violence, and of processes and criteria for ensuring the capacity of the Court to implement justice for women.

At the 1995 Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, UNIFEM was singled out as the primary UN body to help implement a “Platform for Action” adopted at the meeting.

The Conference, which recognised “the special role of UNIFEM in the promotion and empowerment of women,” gave priority to tackling four key human rights-related issues: violence against women; women and armed conflict; human rights of women; and the girl child.

In 1996 the General Assembly adopted a resolution urging UNIFEM to strengthen activities that address gender-based violence.

The Assembly also decided to set up a Trust Fund, described as a multilateral operational mechanism providing financial support for international, regional, national and grassroots actions aimed at eradicating gender-based violence.

A UN report released last August says that although some statistics regarding basic health and education are encouraging, women continue to be the target of physical and psychological violence “on a scale not known to any other group.”

“Ending violence against women and girls – in our families, communities and societies – remains the greatest challenge facing humanity on the eve of the 21st century,” says Heyzer.

She also points out that combating violence against women is core to UNIFEM’s work. In 1998, for example, UNIFEM brought an unprecedented number of UN agencies, governments, national and regional non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and thousands of community-based groups and media organisations, to participate in a series of campaigns to eliminate gender violence.

These campaigns – in Asia and the Pacific, Africa, and Latin America and the Caribbean – have been pivotal in creating a favourable environment for the introduction of changes in policies and in national legislation.

“They have focused on prevention, providing protection, services and justice, where violence has occurred,” Heyzer points out.

The campaigns have also contributed to opening a discussion on issues traditionally considered taboo and have raised questions about male involvement in the eradication of gender-based violence.

Last November, in a ringing endorsement of UNIFEM, the General Assembly adopted a resolution urging member states to increase their contributions to the organisation.

As a measuring rod, the degree of confidence that member states place on any UN body is usually reflected in the power of its purse. In contrast to many cash-strapped UN bodies and agencies, UNIFEM is in robust financial health.

Since 1994, when UNIFEM had a budget of about 14 million dollars, total contributions from core and co-financing activities have continued to rise: 17.5 million dollars in 1997, 22.7 million dollars in 1998 and an estimated 30 million dollars in 1999.