国連女性機関執行理事会第二回定期会合における星野大使によるステートメント

平成30年9月10日
Thank you, Madam President.
 
At the outset, I would like to express my gratitude to Madam Mlambo-Ngcuka, for your informative, thoughtful, forward-looking and passionate statement. And I would like to thank your Excellency Ambassador Ivana Pajević for your dedicated work as the President of the Executive Board.
 
Madam President,
 
Almost a year has passed since the launch of the UN-Women Strategic Plan 2018-2021. We welcome the effort made so far by the entity toward organizational reform.
 
In particular, we underscore the importance of implementing and adapting the Plan in the context of the UN Development System Reform. We believe it is fundamental that the UN Development System, including UN-Women, ensures stronger system-wide coordination and partnership that also contributes to advancement of its activities across the humanitarian- development-peace nexus. Japan values this human-centered, holistic approach towards gender equality and women’s empowerment to leave no one behind. And this is a question of individual women and girls to ensure their human security, and we must ensure. We very much look forward to seeing tangible outcomes from UN-Women’s activities based on the Strategic Plan moving forward.
 
While today’s main subject is the structured dialogue on financing, we’d like to mention that we commend the effort by the UN-Women toward financing reform.
I must admit that Japan continues to operate under severe financial and fiscal constraints. However, in view of our high recognition and evaluation of UN women and our understanding on the importance of core resources of the entity, we have made a disbursement of 5.5 million US dollars to UN-Women’s core resources, as highlighted in the good news part of the national reporting of your organization, and this is actually the increase from last year in terms of Japanese Yen as well. With regard to non-core resources, we have already disbursed about 18 million dollars in 2017. Japan will continue to strongly support the activities of UN-Women. In this regard, we would like to raise the following three points regarding financing:
 
First, while we recognize that UN-Women has achieved continuous growth of its overall resources over the last four years, the stagnation of its core budget remains a major challenge for UN-Women. In order for the entity’s finances to become robust and sustainable, we must expand contributions beyond the top 10 donors, which currently provide nearly seventy percent of its entire core budget. In this connection, we take positive note of and are willing to support the recent efforts of the entity to enhance its donor base by strengthening ties with the private sector, foundations and other stakeholders.
 
Second, although the revenue of UN-Woman comprises contributions from donors, it is not a given condition. We would like to emphasize the appropriate monitoring and reporting continue to be critical for donor’s engagement with UN-Woman’s activities.
 
Third, we appreciate UN-Women’s operational activities and emphasize that their results should be widely visible to the public. We believe this will lead to UN-Women garnering more confidence and trust from donor-contributors and taxpayers.
 
Before concluding, I would like to join Ambassador Petersen of Denmark and others to express our appreciation to my friend Yannick for you contributions and also your brain child project, we were impressed with that. Finally, I would like to mention one of our own initiatives, that is Prime Minister’s initiative to hold the fifth “World Assembly for Women” (W-A-W we say “WAW!”) in Tokyo next March. Based on the outcomes and review process of the past four assemblies, we would like to once again make use of this international forum to further deepen our discussion on the challenges that women are facing today. We are looking forward to welcoming guests and participants from across the world.
 
So thank you very much, Madam President.