Speech: The progress shared from your own countries demonstrates what national leadership, strong institutions, and sustained partnership can achieve

We heard your call for the Strategic Plan to deliver measurable results, grounded in national priorities and reflected in the lives of women and girls. The progress shared from your own countries demonstrates what national leadership, strong institutions, and sustained partnership can achieve.

We also heard your concern about the rollback of women’s rights and the shrinking space and resources available to women’s organisations.

This is central to our Strategic Plan, which commits us to ensuring that women’s organisations shape action on the ground. We will continue to strengthen their leadership and channel resources to them, including through the UN Trust Fund to End Violence against Women and the Women’s Peace and Humanitarian Fund, particularly in conflict and crisis settings.

You emphasised the meaningful participation of young women and the need to harness technology to advance gender equality, while addressing the risks and threats it can create for women and girls.

As we continue implementing our Strategic Plan, we will give greater priority to young women’s leadership, expand their influence in decision-making, and ensure they help shape and leverage the technologies defining their future.

Across these priorities, your message was clear: ambition must be matched by predictable, flexible, and sustainable financing. Quality funding is essential to maintain expertise, respond to crises, and ensure that resources reach women and girls where they are most needed.

Once again, I thank all our partners for their continued support and for recognising that strong results require strong investment. The decisions adopted at this session give us clear guidance on financing our Strategic Plan, on strengthening governance and oversight, and on engaging with the UN80 Initiative.

I commend you for engaging in a constructive spirit and for the flexibility that enabled consensus. We will take these decisions forward with a clear sense of responsibility to this Board.

We recognise the strong support expressed for the Secretary-General’s UN80 Initiative, and we fully share it. It remains an opportunity to make the United Nations better equipped to address the challenges we face. We have heard you clearly, and your continued commitment to engaging constructively with the UN80 initiative.

We are appreciative of your strong emphasis that any structural reform must fully safeguard the integrity of the triple mandate of UN Women and demonstrably strengthen country-level delivery. We agree.

The decisions adopted at this session also emphasised that you are not in a position to make a recommendation of support on a merger between UNFPA and UN Women at this time, and that you encouraged us to explore implementation of alternative options, without pre-empting a possible recommendation on a potential merger. We heard you loud and clear.

The decisions on the way forward rest fully with you, our Board, our Member States. We look forward to further discussing the UN80 Initiative at both formal and informal sessions of our Executive Board before the Board is able to make a formal recommendation on the potential merger of UN Women and UNFPA. And we will continue to provide you with the analysis requested, and work in full transparency with you, our Board.

Across the perspectives expressed, we recognise the ambition that unites us: to strengthen the United Nations, to strengthen the gender equality architecture at the United Nations, to enhance our collective impact, and deliver more effectively for the women and girls we were mandated to serve.

You can count on UN Women’s continued responsiveness and full cooperation as your deliberations proceed.

We meet only days after the opening of the eighty-first session of the General Assembly [UNGA81], under the theme “Restoring trust, managing transformation: A United Nations that delivers for all”. This theme speaks directly to the discussions we have held here. Trust is built through transparency and accountability. Transformation must produce results. And a United Nations that delivers for all must deliver equally for women and girls.

With only four years remaining to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals, UNGA81 must be a moment of urgency and resolve. It offers an opportunity to reaffirm the value of multilateral action and to ensure that women’s rights, leadership, and participation inform decisions across peace, development, and human rights.

We look forward to engaging with you in the weeks ahead and to carrying the partnership demonstrated in this room into the work of the General Assembly. This partnership is sustained not only through our formal deliberations, but also by the people whose dedication and service make them possible.

It is therefore, if I may, it is fitting that, as we close, we recognise once more our dear Executive Board Secretary, Mr. Jean-Luc Bories. Jean-Luc, the warmth and the tributes expressed during this session by our Board members reflect the esteem in which you are held. We thank you profoundly for 15 years of exceptional service, sound counsel, and devotion to this Board. You leave with our appreciation and our gratitude and our very best wishes. And I thank you always.

And allow me, again, to extend a warm welcome to Mr. Ziad Sheikh as our incoming Secretary of the Executive Board. I trust the Secretariat remains in good hands.

My thanks also to colleagues across UN Women, to the Executive Board Secretariat, and to all those who worked and whose work made this session possible.

This session has given us clear guidance and renewed purpose.

With your continued partnership, UN Women will carry that guidance forward with determination and will translate it into progress for ALL women and girls.

I thank you.