In 2006, the Secretary General’s High-Level Panel on UN System-World Coherence proposed consolidating elements of the UN system focused on women into one larger and stronger women’s agency. This recommendation was endorsed by Kofi Annan and later unanimously approved by the General Assembly on 2 July 2010.
As part of its reform agenda, the UN created a new agency called UN Women, dedicated to promoting global gender equality and women’s empowerment. This reform is intended to streamline and improve the UN system, combining four separate parts into one. The hope is that better coordination and outreach can result from this union. In an attempt to assess how this reform may be beneficial to the UN system and women around the world, the Global Governance Institute has launched a research and advice project on ‘Reforming for Results? UN Women and the promotion of global gender equality’. This GGI Background Paper will provide a brief outline of the nature of women’s rights and examines the core institutions within the UN that have so far focused on gender equality as well as those that have been combined in the newly created UN Women entity. This will be followed by a brief examination of the goals and potential strength of UNWomen. The background paper forms the first in a series of GGI publications on tracking and analysing the performance of UN Women in the context of global governance efforts to promote gender equality and the empowerment of women.