UNITED NATIONS, May 30: India has called on the international community to increase its financial support to the United Nations’ body dealing with women’s empowerment, to help it meet the global commitments of gender equality.
Addressing the annual session of UN Women’s executive board yesterday, India’s Permanent Representative to the UN Hardeep Singh Puri said work on gender equality and empowerment of women continues to remain “chronically underfunded”.
Puri said in order to ensure that UN Women stands for action, the donor community must move beyond the political rhetoric of just stated commitments, and transform them into the much needed monetary support for the organisation.
“We hope that the comprehensive resource mobilisation strategy would help in widening the donor base in order to secure the resources required by UN Women in meeting its global commitments,” the Indian envoy said.
India has promised a five million dollar contribution to the core predictable funding of UN Women, which became operational in January 2011.
Of this, it has already contributed two million dollars.
Puri said that India would always be willing to “walk the extra mile” and continue to provide full political and financial support to UN Women, calling on other nations to do the same.
He reaffirmed India’s steadfast commitment to the all round social, economic and political empowerment of women, “whatever effort and resources the task might take”.
India also extended its support to improve the organisational structure of UN Women to make it more dynamic, decentralised, cohesive and well-connected as the agency undertakes a regional architecture review of its structure.
Puri said that among the key challenges faced by UN Women in 2011 was the systematic exclusion of women from peace negotiations and their economic exclusion.
“While identification of such critical challenges is important, it may also be worthwhile suggesting approaches to address these challenges in the future strategic plans, so that decision makers are able to factor such approaches during the policy formulation stage itself,” he added. (PTI)
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