Ministry Statements & Speeches:
New Zealand welcomes the draft UN Women Strategic Plan for 2026–2029 and looks forward to its adoption at this Executive Board meeting. We commend UN Women for its continued leadership in advancing gender equality and the empowerment of all women and girls, particularly at this time of growing global uncertainty.
This Strategic Plan is clear, coherent, and appropriately ambitious. It builds on UN Women’s unique triple mandate and offers a clear, integrated framework for systemic change. We welcome its focus on the four impact areas and are particularly encouraged by the Plan’s:
- Grounding in core human rights and its reaffirmation of multilaterally-agreed commitments, including the Beijing Declaration and CEDAW;
- Its recognition of intersectionality, ensuring that the most marginalised women and girls are not left behind; and
- Its pragmatic approach to delivering results in a constrained funding environment, through innovation, partnerships, and locally-led solutions.
This Strategic Plan arrives at a critical juncture. We facem as the Executive Director has observed, “the most complex multilateral space in a generation” – arguably, in several generations. The current environment of political polarisation and fiscal uncertainty threatens to reverse hard-won gains. UN Women’s Plan offers a resilient and forward-looking response to these challenges that positions the organisation well to achieve progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals.
As a Pacific country, New Zealand strongly supports the Plan’s commitment to inclusive and context-sensitive programming, including in Small Island Developing States. We welcome UN Women’s growing humanitarian role and its efforts to ensure that climate action, peacebuilding, and social protection are gender-responsive and locally driven.
We also reiterate our call for predictable, flexible, and core funding to enable UN Women to deliver effectively and equitably. In the current environmental of increasingly constrained funding, this is more important than ever. We encourage continued investment in partnerships with women’s organisations, especially those in the Pacific, and in strengthening institutional resilience across the UN system.
New Zealand reaffirms its strong partnership with UN Women. We remain committed to working together to ensure that gender equality remains central to our efforts to achieve more peaceful, prosperous, just, and sustainable societies, now and into the future.