(2nd meeting) UN-Women Executive Board, Second Regular Session 2026

Distinguished delegates, welcome back to the second regular session of the UN Women Executive Board. Please take a seat. Let us continue with agenda item 3 on structured dialogue on financing during which the Board will receive a presentation on the report on the structured dialogue on financing the results of the UN Women Strategic Plan 2022-2025 and future direction for the Strategic Plan 2026-2029. In addition to the Executive Director, Deputy Executive Director and the Secretary, I am pleased to welcome to the podium the following UN Women colleagues: Mr. Kambu Fofana, OIC Deputy Executive Director and Chief Financial Officer and Director of the Division of Finance and Administration; Mrs. Sara Hendriks, Director of Policy, Program and Intergovernmental Division; Mrs. Anna-Karin Hjortfors, Director, Strategy, Planning, Results and Effectiveness Division; and Mrs. Megan Gilgun, Chief, Public Partnerships. I am pleased to invite the Chief of Public Partnerships, Mrs. Megan Gilgan, to present the report on the structured dialogue on financing the results of the UN Women Strategic Plan 2022-2025 and future direction of the Strategic Plan 2026-2029. I will open the floor for your comments and questions after her presentations. as well as comments on the joint cost recovery report as needed. Without further ado, please, Megan, you have the floor.

Thank you very much, Madam Chair. Chair, Excellencies, distinguished delegates and colleagues, the presentation shared during the informal session provided a detailed overview of UN Women's financial position and funding outlook. Today, I will present a condensed version. However, I would be pleased to respond to any questions on the more comprehensive presentation delivered in August as well. While the focus of this session is the financing of UN Women's strategic plan, I want to center our discussion on what this financing enables. It funds and fuels results for women and girls across the world. Within the framework of UN Women's strategic plan, the organization deploys world-class gender expertise, builds trusted relationships with government, civil society, the private sector, and supports UN system coordination to deliver transformative results for women and girls. Sustained flexible financing at scale is what enables all these actions. I know that you are acutely aware of the broader development financing environment, which is undergoing a structural reset. In 2025, I will wait for the slides to catch up. Next slide. Yes. In 2025, official development assistance and core contributions to the UN development system declined by 23 and 27% respectively. Even before this unprecedented downturn, we know that investment in gender equality was lagging behind global commitments and demand. In 2025, against this backdrop, UN Women's financial performance demonstrated resilience. when compared with the rest of the UN system and ODA in general. Total contributions reached $531 million in 2025. Regular resources declined by roughly 7% and other resources declined by 11%, marking the first decline in other resources in more than a decade. Next slide. Turning to the present and the future, The new, more sharply focused strategic plan sets out an ambitious but achievable agenda. Delivering that agenda will require close to $2.5 billion over the four-year period, with about 80% of those resources directed towards programmatic results. The $1.05 billion in projected resource requirements for the first two years of the strategic plan anticipates $350 million in regular resources and $700 million in other resources. Next slide. This brings me to regular resources. Regular resources fund the functions that only UN Women delivers, including normative leadership and UN system-wide coordination. As a recent UN SWAP findings highlight weakening gender capacity across parts of the UN system, regular resources are essential to sustaining the accountability and technical leadership needed to keep gender equality prioritized and financed. Regular resources also underpin specialized expertise, feminist advocacy, and the institutional capacities that make our work across development, humanitarian, and peace contexts possible. This morning, we have disseminated our regular resources report for 2025, which provides a range of concrete examples of how regular resources are achieving results across the world. I will note just three examples now. In 2025, regular resources helped to advance legal reforms on violence against women in Bosnia-Herzegovina, expanded paternity and maternity leave in Cote d'Ivoire, and maintained support to women's organizations in Afghanistan while leveraging additional earmarked resources. Importantly, they also enable us to mobilize and deploy significantly larger volumes of earmarked funding. In an increasingly uncertain environment, regular resources remain our most strategic source of financing. Next slide. Looking ahead, our financing priorities are clear. First, to strengthen and expand regular resources to safeguard UN Women's triple mandate, we will we will continue to engage emerging donors so that commitments to gender equality are matched by the resources that are needed to deliver results. We will also focus on individual giving through our national committees to deliver consistent, regular resources. Individual giving is where we ask members of the public to make regular donations to support women and girls worldwide. Individual giving delivered strong growth in 2025, with monthly giving increasing by 39%. We have already added additional capacity to enable a further scaling up of these resources. Second, we will seek to increase flexible or softly earmarked funding, particularly through the funding of strategic notes and pooled funding mechanisms that strengthen harmonization, country ownership, and efficiency. Third, we will look to diversify funding in earmarked resources to further scale and expand on the foundation already provided by regular resources. We will do this by increasing support from international financial institutions, philanthropic partners, and the private sector. And fourth, we will seek to further increase multi-year commitments to improve predictability and long-term planning. These priorities are not new, but they take on a greater importance in the financing environment that we now face. Next slide. Chair, Excellencies, the evidence is clear that investing in gender equality delivers results. You have been clear as our executive board that UN Women's mandate is critical to the delivery of gender equality for the UN system and for the world. The challenge before us is ensuring that financing keeps pace with our shared ambitions. We would like once again to thank all of our partners for their continued support and engagement. We know that you are working as hard as we are to secure the needed resources for women and girls. And we look forward to our discussion.

Thank you very much for your very interesting presentation, Megan. I now would like to open the floor for member states interventions with respect to the aforementioned agenda item. Please, the floor is open. The distinguished delegate from Luxembourg, you have the floor.

Thank you, Madam Chair. Madam Executive Director, I have the honor to speak on behalf of the Benelux countries, Belgium, the Kingdom of the Netherlands, and my own country, Luxembourg. Let me begin by thanking Executive Director Sima Bahous for her leadership and UN Women staff around the world for their continued efforts to advance the rights and well-being of women and girls everywhere. At a time of increasing political and financial pushback against gender equality, we, the Benelux countries, reaffirm our strong commitment to UN Women and its triple mandate. We thank you for the report on UN Women's funding situation throughout the last strategic plan. While we note that UN Women has been comparatively less affected by the current environment of funding constraints, we remain concerned that the organization continues to operate under significant financial pressure. The continued concentration of the resource base is also worrying, with 77% of regular resources now coming from the 10 largest contributors. We are also concerned about the growing imbalance between regular and other resources and the constraints this places on UN Women's ability to fully deliver on its mandate. Regular resources decreased for a second consecutive year, while the decline in other resources in 2025 marked the first decrease since 2012. As the report highlights, this has contributed to a growing misalignment between available funding and the implementation of UN Women's mandate and strategic plan for 2026-2029. Against this background, could you elaborate on how UN Women is ensuring that funding pressures do not undermine the balance between its normative, coordination and operational functions? Maintaining a balanced funding mix is essential. We therefore underline the importance of predictable, flexible and multi-year co-funding, which provides the institutional foundation for UN Women to deliver its mandate effectively. Regular resources also enable greater alignment with national priorities, strengthen UN coherence on the Resident Coordinator leadership, and allow the UN to respond to emerging needs without renegotiating funding arrangements. Member States have an important role to play in promoting greater coordination and reducing fragmentation, particularly in the context of UN 18. We are therefore pleased to share that Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg have each signed multi-year co-funding arrangements with UN Women in 2025. We recognize the significant steps UN Women is taking to adapt to the current financial environment. We welcome the measures undertaken to enhance efficiency and preserve programmatic delivery while safeguarding its normative coordination and operational mandates. We also appreciate UN Women's efforts to engage proactively in joint programs and inter-agency pooled funds. In this regard, could you provide further information on how UN Women is engaging with the joint SDG funds, what results and lessons have emerged from this engagement to date, and how these are informing UN Women's approach going forward? Finally, maintaining donor confidence requires continued transparency, accountability, and clear demonstration of results. We encourage UN Women to strengthen the visibility of results achieved through flexible funding, demonstrating how these resources translate into tangible outcomes for women and girls and contribute to sustainable development. Recognizing that strengthening UN Women's funding base cannot rely on member state contributions alone, we welcome continued efforts to diversify funding and strengthen strategic partnerships. We commend the development of complementary strategies on public-private partnerships and institutional foundations, and look forward to regular updates on the implementations and the results achieved. Madam Executive Director. We, the Benelux countries, look forward to continuing our strong partnership with UN Women and to supporting the organization in delivering on its mandate for all women and girls in the years ahead. Thank you.

I thank the representative of Luxembourg. Are there any other requests for the floor? I see no requests, so... Excuse me. I will now, I would like to invite the Secretariat to respond to the two questions of the Benelux. Thank you.

Thank you very much for the questions and also thank you very much for championing multi-year funding, which indeed allows us to plan better and look into the future. I think the first question on how we are trying to ensure that funding pressures don't undermine the important triple mandate, the normative coordination and programmatic functions. Even before 2025, and I would invite our chief financial officer perhaps to comment further, UN Women was taking a very pragmatic approach in terms of cost containment, balanced across both headquarters regional and country offices to ensure that the prioritized areas of support, in particular coordination, normative, and importantly, presence in key countries is preserved while being very conscious of the softening funding environment. So that was something that was done prior to 2025, and that pragmatic approach continues as we move forward. As you say, the appropriate funding mix is critical, particularly the flexible funding that would allow us to move resources from one particular area to another when we see that there is a critical emerging need or a widening funding gap. So again, that forward-looking approach, being able to have very specific financial planning with a good outlook as to what resources are becoming available, as well as the flexible funding to allow us to pivot as needed. I think with regards to the specific question on the joint SDG fund, I will turn over to Sarah Hendrix. I'm sorry.

Madam President, thank you so much. Indeed, thank you to the Benelux delegates for this important question on UN Women's role in the Joint SDG Fund. Indeed, just to confirm, UN Women has approached this fund as a critical conduit to ensure the advancement of the full 2030 agenda, but in particular, the gender equality indicators and targets across the agenda. In doing so, UN Women is officially part of the governance structure of the SDG Fund, specifically the Operational Steering Committee, and we've been doing this since 2023. Before that and through this period, we have long supported a very intentional approach of gender mainstreaming across the SDG Fund operations at a technical level. As a result, and certainly as a result of our Deputy Executive Director, Inyiradza Gumunvanda's engagement with this governance mechanism, the Fund has proactively adopted the gender equality marker, supported also by our coordination division, to really monitor financial commitments and spending that the SDG Fund undertakes to ensure that its objectives are reached effectively and benefit women and girls effectively as well. We do continue to support the fund in applying that marker to all proposals and in reviewing gender mainstreaming across all submissions. And in 2025 alone, UN Women reviewed over 100 joint proposals and drew upon the expertise across the UN system to guide better gender integration and to provide tailored and quality technical guidance. It is our hope and our aim that the SDG Fund becomes indeed a financing mechanism that the entire system sees as a conduit to grow results for gender equality, women's empowerment, and rights. Thank you so much.

Thank you very much, Mrs. Hendriks. I would now like to give the floor to the Deputy Executive Director. You have the floor.

Thank you so much, Madam President, to add a few extra points to Director Sarah Hendrick's contribution. Also to affirm that UN Women at the country level sits in the country team when the decisions are being made in the negotiations of the joint SDG Fund. For us, that is very important because we are influencing the prioritization of the SDG funds, but also where we have the comparative advantages also funding to UN Women. Building on this same comment on the SDG fund, as UN Women, we're also looking at the other funds in the United Nations, including the humanitarian response funds, including the multi-partner trust fund office mandate on so many other funds. And the same principle applies that we want to see gender equality integrated into those multi-partner funds that are managed by the United Nations as an accountability tool, and also to maybe take an opportunity to appreciate the support that you also continue to provide to the funds, the UN system funds that are managed and led by UN Women, the Violence Against Women Trust Fund. and as well as the Women, Peace and Humanitarian Fund. So, yes, indeed, on the SDG Fund, but also to appreciate the recognition on the funds for gender equality that are managed directly by UN Women on behalf of the United Nations system. Thank you very much.

Thank you, Madam Deputy Executive Director. And I now would like to give the floor to the Director of Strategy, Planning, Results and Effectiveness Division, Mrs. Anna Cahin. Ms. Cahin, you have the floor.

Thank you, Ambassador, for giving me the floor. I just wanted to respond to the specific questions on how we are strengthening the visibility of results achieved from flexible resources, including direct funding to strategic notes. This is indeed an important area of work for us this year. We've continued to make enhancements to our transparency portal to provide in line with our executive director's commitment to transparency and accountability so that our funding partners can track expenditures in time against results. This year, we have strengthened AI-enabled search functionality, as well as mobile applications on the go to really enable and partners to continuously keep track of the results that are being achieved. We now have dedicated pages for the SN direct funding, which is direct funding to strategic notes, as well as for regular resources and dedicated pages per funding partner. That is a tool for all of you, and we hope that it can show what is being achieved by those types of flexible resources, but also supporting to incentivize and mobilize more flexible resources. And then finally, with regards to how we are also from a strategic plan perspective, ensuring balanced implementation of the triple mandate, just to remind us that in the new strategic plan that we're implementing as of this year, we did intentionally put coordination indicators and results across all of the three outcomes, of course, in addition to a dedicated outcome on norms and standards. So we hope that as of Executive Director's 2026 annual report onward, you will see the results from the integrated triple mandate being consistently reported. So this is also part of our strategy to ensure that despite funding constraints, we are not adversely impacting on the balance of investments, but really staying true to the triple mandate. Thank you so much.

Thank you very much, Anna-Karin. If there are no other comments statements, we can conclude our discussion on this item. Before we conclude today's session, let me give the floor to the Secretary for a few quick reminders. Jean-Luc.

Thank you. Thank you very much, Madam Vice-President. So, since we have concluded this afternoon, we'll now resume the informal negotiation on draft decisions, and we are all inviting all delegations to join us at the UN Women headquarters. We are located, for those who haven't been there yet, on the 220 East 42nd Street, 19th floor, conference room. And we'll be helping you through the security downstairs. So please, we'll see you in about half an hour to get there. So at 4:00, let's say we start at 4:00. Thank you very much.

Thank you very much, Jean-Luc. So, thank you again and see you tomorrow morning for the second day of the second regular session. The session is now adjourned.