On 2nd July 2010, the worldwide neighborhood birthed a brand new UN company,the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Ladies (UN Ladies), whose institution was made doable by the approaching collectively of member states and the highly effective world ladies’s motion. As we mark fifteen years since UN Ladies’s institution this month, we should pay tribute to those that delivered to life the imaginative and prescient of a devoted UN entity for the empowerment of girls and women and we should recommit and proceed to put money into realizing its mandate.
By H.E. Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Former President of the Republic of Liberia, contributing author
In some ways, the story of UN Ladies is the story of world solidarity. It’s the results of many years of tireless advocacy by the worldwide ladies’s motion, the unwavering dedication of Member States, and a recognition that half of humanity deserves an company wholly devoted to advancing their rights, alternatives, and voices. Constructing on the legacy of the UN Growth Fund for Ladies (UNIFEM), and the opposite places of work present then for the development of girls, UN Ladies’s creation, in 2010, represented a breakthrough second for multilateralism: a daring assertion that gender equality is just not peripheral, however central to justice, peace and growth.
The sooner years of UN Ladies’s institution represented a transformative time in Liberia’s historical past. I had simply grow to be Africa’s first democratically elected feminine Head of State, an consequence made doable by the dedication and organizing energy of Liberian ladies. The importance of my election, and the institution of UN Ladies, felt a part of a broader wave: one which noticed ladies, notably from post-conflict nations like ours, taking their rightful place on the forefront of peacebuilding.
In Liberia, UN Ladies shortly grew to become a trusted associate,working alongside authorities, civil society, and conventional leaders to embed gender equality into nationwide insurance policies and priorities, strengthening coordination throughout sectors to handle the foundation causes of inequality.
UN Ladies’s investments have been strategic and cognisant of the lived realities of Liberian ladies. It has supported ladies’s financial empowerment by expertise coaching, entry to finance, and grownup literacy packages—notably for rural ladies. It has helped to determine and strengthen ladies’s networks—from rural ladies’s platforms to cross-border merchants’ associations and the Peace Hut ladies, offering them with instruments to arrange, advocate, and lead.
UN Ladies has additionally performed a key position in selling ladies’s political participation, offering mentorship and marketing campaign coaching for feminine candidates, and supporting civic engagement initiatives to create an enabling surroundings for girls to steer. As well as, it has supported the adoption of insurance policies and packages to finish violence in opposition to ladies and women, reinforcing the broader objective of making certain ladies’s full, equal, and secure participation in all features of private and non-private life.
As we replicate on this journey, I’m reminded that the work of constructing sturdy, inclusive, and equitable societies should proceed throughout generations. That’s the very spirit that animates the Ellen Johnson Sirleaf Presidential Heart for Ladies and Growth. Established after I left workplace, the Heart is a continuation of the dedication to advancing ladies’s public management in Africa. Via our flagship Amujae Initiative, we help high-achieving African ladies leaders to ascend to the very best echelons of public service, equipping them to interrupt boundaries, affect coverage, and rework governance methods for the higher. Via our Information Hub, now we have been accumulating and publishing knowledge on the illustration of girls within the varied choice making our bodies in all 54 nations.
On this regard, the EJS Heart stands as a associate and ally to establishments like UN Ladies. We share a typical mission: to problem the methods that exclude, to uplift the voices too usually ignored, and to construct a future the place ladies’s management is just not an aspiration, however a actuality. Our work attracts from the identical effectively of braveness and conviction that introduced UN Ladies into being— and we stay dedicated to carrying this legacy ahead, in Liberia and throughout the continent.
Fifteen years later, and as we mark Beijing+30 we observe plain positive aspects in lots of nations: extra women are at school, extra ladies are serving in management roles, and authorized protections in opposition to gender-based violence have been strengthened in lots of nations. But, progress stays uneven. Too many ladies, notably in fragile, conflict-affected, and under-resourced settings, proceed to face systemic boundaries to equality and justice.
Right this moment, UN Ladies marks its fifteenth anniversary at a time of disaster and reckoning. The worldwide rollback on ladies’s rights, shrinking sources, and political pushback remind us that positive aspects can by no means be taken as a right. If something, they underscore simply how related, how vital, and the way pressing UN Ladies’s mission stays.
Simply as ladies around the globe mobilized to make UN Ladies a actuality, we should now unite once more. Ladies in Liberia and globally should come collectively to guard the positive aspects now we have made and push additional towards the targets now we have but to succeed in. We should stand in solidarity with these on the frontlines defending human rights, shaping coverage, main actions, and advancing peace and sustainable growth.
Liberia, a trailblazer in implementing the Beijing+30 agenda and the Ladies, Peace and Safety agenda, has a chance to steer once more. As we take our seat on the United Nations Safety Council, we should amplify our legacy of gender inclusion in peacebuilding and champion partnerships with establishments corresponding to UN Ladies which are rooted in native realities and world ambition.
I congratulate UN Ladies on this milestone. Could the following fifteen years carry us nearer to the world now we have lengthy envisioned: one the place each lady and woman can stay in dignity, security, and freedom—and the place her management is acknowledged not as an exception, however because the norm.
