Thank you, Executive Director for your presentation of UN Women’s implementation of UN reform.
Norway welcomes UN Women’s active engagement and efforts to realize UN reform.
First, we are pleased to note that you have made progress in aligning UN Women’s guidelines, rules and procedures, to UN reform decisions. These changes are crucial in order to make UN reform a reality on the ground.
It is very positive that UN Women includes the Resident Coordinators in performance appraisals. We would appreciate if you could elaborate on what such an appraisal include. Does it look at cooperation across organizations for instance?
We would also like a clarification of what an “end of cycle performance assessment” means and whether this will be done every year, or only at the end of the contract.
Secondly, we are pleased to see that the process of making UN-Women fit for the new realities are making headway, and that the first phase of the country typology review has been completed. We note that this implies that a decision has been made to strengthen 19 country offices and phase out 16 programme presences. We support this approach and believe that strengthening your presence in strategic countries will provide more leverage, better results and in turn – also better opportunities for resource mobilization.
We were, however, wondering if the changes in country presence mean that all program offices are phased out, or if some will be maintained? We also wonder if new country offices will be established, existing strengthened, or if some programme offices will be changed into country offices, and what is the timeline for the remainder of this process?
We have also noted that you will be piloting various models for UN Women’s engagement in countries without country presence and would appreciate more information on when you anticipate that the results and conclusions from these pilots are going to be available. These conclusions will be important for us as member states in preparation for the QCPR process later this year.
Finally, we would like to remind you of decision 2019/4 paragraph 6 in last year’s Annual Meeting, where UN-Women was asked to provide the Board an update on “the status of its internal reform processes, including the country typology and the headquarter review, and to provide a timeline for progress in their implementation, including information with regard to possible budgetary implications and consequences for the internal control mechanisms at its first regular session”.
We cannot see that the latter part (timeline, budgetary implications, consequences for internal control) have been provided at this meeting and would welcome an update.
Thank you.