What are the mandate and functions of UN Women? Explain its various activities towards achieving the Sustainable Development Goal-5.
UN Women is a global organization to promote gender Equality and Women Empowerment. It works mainly on five areas
- To increase women’s leadership and participation;
- To stop violence against women;
- To promote women in all aspects of peace and security processes;
- Enhancing women’s economic empowerment; and
- Making gender equality central to national development planning and budgeting.
Presently, UN women is working to achieve Goal 5 i.e. Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls. Some of the activities taken by UN women to achieve goal 5 along with gender sensitive targets in other goals are
- UN women launched a program known as Making every women and Girl count. Through this program, it provides technical and financial support to countries to improve the production and use of gender statistics in order to monitor the implementation of gender equality commitments in the 2030 agenda.
- UN Women act as an observer in Inter-agency and Expert Group on SDG Indicators to promote gender equality and gave suggestions for the upliftment of women.
- Recently UN women launched a new flagship programme “Gender Inequality of Risk”, in partnership with the United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (UNISDR) and the International Federation of Red Cross (IFRC)
To support countries in their efforts to implement the Sustainable development goals UN Women has developed twelve Flagship Programming Initiatives (FPIs). They are women’s political empowerment and leadership, women’s access to justice, women’s empowerment through climate-smart agriculture, prevention and access to essential services to end violence against women, gender inequality of risk in a changing climate, women’s engagement in peace, security & recovery, women’s leadership, empowerment, access and protection (leap) in crisis response, income generation and security through decent work and social protection for women, equal opportunities for women entrepreneurs, safe cities and safe public spaces, transformative financing for gender equality, gender statistics for SDGs localization.
Topics: GS-II: Important International Institutions Agencies and Fora