Speech: Gender equality at the heart of our vision: the engine driving sustainable development
Remarks by UN Women Executive Director Sima Bahous at the interactive multi-stakeholder hearing on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, at the UN Headquarters, on 24 July 2025.
[As delivered]
Thirty years ago, the Beijing Declaration set out a bold, uncompromising vision: full equality for all women and girls. Today, that vision is just as vital, but remains painfully out of reach.
We meet in a moment of reckoning. Crises are multiplying, inequalities are deepening, rights once secured are under attack. And, at the very moment when needs are greatest, funding is fading away.
Less than one per cent of aid targets ending gender-based violence. Women-led organizations—our frontline defenders—are at risk of collapse.
But within the crisis lies opportunity.
The UN80 process offers us a rare chance: to rebuild multilateralism to be more inclusive, more effective, and more accountable to those we serve.
At the heart of our vision must be gender equality, not as a side issue or a single goal, but as the engine driving sustainable development.
This goes beyond SDG 5—gender equality is not a problem to solve but the best solution we have to realize yet.
But, at our current pace, women will need to wait 137 years to escape extreme poverty, and 286 years for full equality. They cannot wait that long. Nor can we. Nor should we.
The Beijing+30 Action Agenda launched earlier this year by UN Women is a collective commitment, rooted in the national reviews of 159 countries, grounded in evidence, driven by partnership, and centred on accountability. It charts the path forward.
Our Action Agenda sets out delivering for every woman and girl through six urgent priorities: digital transformation, freedom from poverty, ending violence in all its forms, achieving equal leadership and decision-making power, ensuring peace and security, and advancing climate justice. And running through them all—our “+1”: placing young people at the centre of every effort, every policy, every solution.
We know partnership works. Five years ago, born as a flagship outcome of the 25th anniversary of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, Generation Equality proved it.
Together, we have driven over 12,000 new policies and actions—across sectors, across generations, and across the world.
We have proved what is possible when we share power and responsibility: coordination is strengthened, innovation is unlocked, and impact is amplified. This must become the standard. UN Women is committed to embedding this way of working across our mandate, and to supporting the wider UN system to do the same.
As we look ahead to the high-level meeting of the General Assembly this September, one truth is clear: multilateralism remains our strongest tool—but only if it is genuinely inclusive, with the lived realities of women and girls at its centre.
2025 will be a crossroads. Let history judge us not by our promises, but by rights fulfilled for the women and girls.
Let us listen to youth. Trust grassroots leaders. Stand with feminists driving change. And above all, let us push forward, together.
UN Women is ready. Ready to partner, ready to deliver, and ready to transform hope into action, together with you.
I know that you are all also ready.
Thank you.
