Member News
100 'Godmothers' met at the Houses of Parliament on Wednesday to demand adequate funding for the new agency, UN Women, writes Baroness Kramer.
UN Women promises an unprecedented opportunity to lift millions of women from poverty – but slow funding support from the UK threatens its effectiveness.
In 2008, I was privileged to go to Ethiopia with Voluntary Services Overseas (VSO) to spend two weeks working with an amazing group of HIV-positive women who had organised to fight for their future. Despite the stigma that surrounded them and the communities that shunned them, they were winning both respect and opportunity.
HIV is a women's disease – two-thirds of new cases arise in young women – but you wouldn't know it from most AIDS-related programmes. This is evident at the highest decision-making level – with the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women (UNIFEM) not represented on UN AIDS – the key decision-making body for the delivery of AIDS programmes to the developing world.
The women I met in Ethiopia had access to anti-retroviral drugs – something many other HIV-positive women in Africa don't have – but they had to fight to access the skills and the opportunities to earn a living for themselves and their families for whom they were the breadwinner. Women were teaching other women to spin and weave to earn the few pence that would put food on the table. They joined with women lawyers to fight for police action against rape and they battled customs, to empower women to refuse unprotected sex.
I have also visited displaced women in Darfur to hear their utter frustration that it is "the men with guns" that get to the negotiating table, not the women who keep the families alive. Women in their 20s, denied the opportunity of marriage by war and displacement, asked who would battle to give them a role and opportunity other than selling themselves on the street. Women of all ages spoke of the constant fear and violence in their lives.
Now, with the establishment of a new powerful UN women's agency, there is real hope that these women of Africa will be present at peace treaty negotiations and on other key decision-making bodies. On January 1, UN Women was finally born after four years of hard labour. Under the leadership of Michelle Bachelet, the former President of Chile, UN Women can battle for the empowerment of women in the way that UNICEF so brilliantly battles for the rights of children. It will provide the UN with a single, dedicated agency to work on women's issues, replacing a range of fragmented and under-resourced entities that lacked influence.
Along with 2,000 others, I have just signed up to be a proud 'Godmother' to this newborn from whom we expect so much. Collectively us Godmothers hope to ensure UN Women delivers on its promises and receives the support from governments – including our own.
Again and again international leaders and development specialists have talked about the importance of empowering women. "Teach a woman to read and her children will read. Loan a woman the money to buy a goat and she will feed her family and educate her children. Give displaced women a voice and they will argue for the community, not personal power."
But in reality it remains a man's world. Women work two-thirds of the world's working hours – but earn just 10 per cent of the world's income. Women do much of the agricultural labour but receive less than one per cent of the credit resource offered to agriculture, and many are still forbidden to own land. The leading cause of death and disability in young women, between 15 and 44, is violence – more than cancer, malaria, traffic accidents and war combined.
So UN Women must quickly grow strong and effective. But money and resources matter. Even the modest minimum annual budget of $500m is not yet funded and the UK is being as slow as the rest. Let's double this budget and get serious. Let the UK lead the way: £122m pounds a year would make us a leading sponsor for this key agency whose success can leverage female power to change life for the poorest in our world.
Baroness Susan Veronica Kramer is a VSO parliamentary volunteer
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