Is the UN Rolling Back Women’s Progress to Pay Its Debts?

The United Nations is in the midst of budget and political turmoil, and as the 80-year old international organization struggles to find ways to make up for billions in unpaid U.S. dues and continue critical programs, a proposal to merge two organizations, U.N. Women and the U.N. Population Fund (UNFPA), is eliciting widespread condemnation, with many activists questioning the timing and potential impact of the consolidation.

XZ, a United Nations staff person who asked for anonymity, is perplexed by what they see as a concerted effort by the world body to roll back progress on reproductive health and gender equity. The merger, they told Truthdig, will weaken both organizations. “If they really want to reform the system, they should look at areas where there actually is a duplication of effort. But that’s not what this is about. Gender is a low-hanging fruit, and it is being used to appease those who want to stop gender equality movements from moving forward.”  

Moreover, XZ adds, the groups have different missions: UNFPA has promoted sexual and reproductive health throughout the world, while U.N. Women has advanced women’s rights, promoted gender equality, and empowered women and girls to be full participants in public life. “U.N. Women has made progress in getting countries to talk about gender equality,” they say, “to support policy decisions that impact how people relate to each other, and has gotten governments to pass laws to punish violence against women and girls. Their work has changed hearts and minds.”

But U.N. administrators are pushing hard for the merger.

Amina Mohammed, U.N. deputy secretary-general and the highest ranking member of the Secretariat in favor of the plan, has argued that it will create “a unified vehicle that brings together the collective muscle of the U.N.’s gender experience with sexual and reproductive health and rights. … It means a single entity that amplifies voices and rights of women and delivers on the mandates with the depth and scale needed.”    

But a wide swath of feminist and women’s rights groups, as well as people working within the two very different organizations, disagree. One is the Feminist Cross-Coalition Working Group on UN80, a broad network convened in 2025 in response to UN80, a systemwide reform process that U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said would eliminate program duplication, increase efficiency and save money. In a widely-circulated letter released this winter, coalition members concluded that “the two institutions selected for a fast-tracked merger are precisely those with mandates most centrally focused on gender equality and sexual and reproductive health and rights — a choice that has never been adequately explained. … We acknowledge that reform is necessary and support efforts to strengthen the U.N.’s efficiency and effectiveness. But reform must be grounded in evidence, not political expedience or austerity.”

The need could not be greater.

Throughout the world, U.N. Women has found that the situation facing women and girls is growing increasingly dire, with an increase in documented gender-based violence and a widening of the digital divide between women and men. In addition, 39% of the world’s young women still fail to finish secondary school and approximately 800 women a day die of preventable pregnancy-related conditions. “Nearly one in four countries is seeing a backlash against women’s rights,” a 2025 U.N. Women press release reported.

In addition, U.N. Women reports that more than 600 million girls and women currently live in conflict zones, and despite on-paper commitments to Security Council Resolution 1325 and the Beijing Declaration of 1995 — mandates that require the U.N. secretary-general and U.N. agencies to promote gender equality and women’s human rights and include women in all decision-making bodies that address the prevention, management and resolution of conflict — opponents of the merger fear that these agreements will be abandoned if the two organizations are joined.

Despite this, and despite growing worldwide opposition to the plan from both inside and outside the U.N., Mohammed and Guterres are pushing the proposal forward. 

They are, of course, not alone in favoring a merger. Bill Ryan, a retired communications officer at UNFPA, also supports it. “Context is important,” Ryan tells Truthdig. “The U.S. is doing its best to destroy the U.N., and I can’t separate what it is doing from the merger proposal.”

Ryan is referring to the fact that the U.S. presently owes the U.N. almost $4 billion in dues, and has withdrawn from 66 international organizations, agencies and commissions since Donald Trump returned to office in 2024. Among them: the U.N. Human Rights Council, the U.N. Education, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and UNICEF. And, although the White House budget for fiscal 2027 includes $5.1 billion for global health, budget watchers note that the allocation eliminates funding for circumcision and services for LGBTQIA+ people and ends financial support for the Pan American Health Organization and GAVI, the Vaccine Alliance. According to KFF.org (formerly the Kaiser Family Foundation), that $5.1 billion is $4.3 billion less than the sum earmarked for global health initiatives just one year earlier.

For Ryan, these realities make the proposed merger both logical and practical. “It makes sense to be a single organization,” he says. “In fact, many of us were baffled when U.N. Women was formed as a separate organization in 2010 since UNFPA emphasizes women’s rights and ending gender-based violence in all of its work on reproductive health and rights.”

Others familiar with the two organizations see it differently, and are deeply suspicious of what is unfolding.

Joanne Sandler, a senior associate at the Gender at Work Institute and the former deputy executive director of the U.N. Development Fund for Women, one of four organizations that merged in 2010 to form U.N. Women, told Truthdig that the proposal “has left many feminists and feminist groups scratching their heads and asking, ‘Why now?’  If the U.N. is looking for strategic consolidation, it makes sense to start with organizations that spend big money. UNFPA and U.N. Women are small money outfits, with a combined budget of about $16 million [in one country]. The large agencies, like the U.N. Development Program and the Office of Project Services, would be better targets if efficiency and money saving are the priorities.”  

But these concerns are not Sandler’s only worries. “To create a composite entity, a resolution will have to go before the General Assembly,” Sandler explains. “The U.S. and a growing number of countries have decided that the word ‘gender’ should be removed from all documents, treaties and agreements. Their desire to remove gender equality and reproductive choice from everything, including the mandates that guide UNFPA and U.N. Women’s work, is clear.” 

If the merger goes before the General Assembly, she says, the world body could reconsider everything under its auspices, including all treaties, agreements and other policies. “It will be handing gender equality opponents a silver platter so that they can dismantle the language of gender equity,” she says. “This is a time when we should be strengthening our commitment to gender parity and putting our political energies into protecting the Beijing [Declaration] and other mandates, not weakening them.”

This is not to say that nothing should change, Sandler says. For example, she supports developing “common back office systems” for communications, human relations, development and the administration of both organizations. “They could also start small,” she says. “Instead of a complete merger, they could pilot joint work in a few countries and see what happens.”

Fadekemi Akinfaderin, chief globe advocacy officer at Fos Feminista, also opposes the merger and told Truthdig that U.N. Women is particularly valuable because it consistently turns a gender lens on humanitarian, development and human rights work. Its efforts, she says, focus not only on government agencies and policies, but also on the U.N. itself to ensure that women’s input is included in every aspect of its functioning.  

“Gender does not just mean women,”  she says. “In my country, Nigeria, using a gender lens has shown that boys in the southeastern part of the country are lagging behind in secondary school completion while in the northern part of the country girls are bearing the brunt of education inequality. This is what it means to use gender to interrogate issues. It gives us a framework to develop strategies that support human rights and equality for everyone.”

At the same time, like Sandler, Akinfaderin fears that opening the merger to the General Assembly could lead to a catastrophic outcome for proponents of gender justice. “The ministries of gender have already been demolished in Argentina and Peru,” she says, “Any signal on a global scale that the commitment to reproductive health and rights and gender equality is weakening will have negative consequences.”  

Like Akinfaderin and Sandler, Pamela Perraud, president of the U.S. Women’s Caucus, a domestic chapter of an international women’s group, sees the merger as “diluting the specific mandates of each organization” and as a way for the U.N. to deprioritize gender. She calls the move “disheartening.”  But because she is particularly tuned in to the role the U.S. is playing in undermining U.N. efficacy, she is especially concerned about U.S. efforts to remove words like “gender,” “diversity,” “equity” and “inclusion” from mandates, treaties and documents. This was evident during the weeklong Commission on the Status of Women meeting this spring, she says, when the U.S. insisted that eight amendments to the body’s Agreed Upon Conclusions be accepted — including one to define gender as exclusively male and female — forcing a vote for the first time in CSW history. Although the U.S. was defeated in the vote, Perraud says that the attempt to “push aside things we have fought for for decades” made the U.S. administration’s priorities clear and signaled promotion of a Heritage Foundation agenda.  

Unsurprisingly, the caucus is pushing back against the proposal.  

“We have written letters to the U.S. Mission, to members of Congress, and to women’s organizations because a merger will cause a disruption of services,” Perraud says. “Yes, they can see if there is a duplication of services at UNFPA and U.N. Women, but every study has shown that the two groups do different things.” U.N. Women, she says, does not work on health, genital mutilation, contraceptive access, abortion or sterilization and instead focuses on ending violence against women and increasing women’s economic empowerment, leadership and political participation. It also works to bring women to the table when peace and security are being discussed. UNFPA, meanwhile, works on reproductive health and rights.

A Fos Feminista analysis confirms that there is very little overlap. “Evidence shows that consolidation would weaken institutional capacity for sexual and reproductive health and rights,” the report concludes, and would “dismantle specialized  infrastructure that has taken three decades to build.” 

Fos Feminista and other feminists and rights advocates are pressuring U.N. Under-Secretary-General Guy Ryder to quash the merger by reminding him that he said that the plan should not move forward if it would weaken existing gender mandates. If they fail to convince him, they expect the General Assembly to take up the merger this summer.

XZ told Truthdig that staff morale throughout the U.N. is currently extremely low. Nonetheless, they concede that the secretary-general is under a lot of pressure because of financial shortfalls and a chorus of voices that want to walk back gender equality.  “They’re using the financial crisis and the growing backlash to progressive issues as an excuse to implement an agenda that curtails gender progress,” they say. “I think that’s why there is such a concerted global project to push women backwards. U.N. Women has upset the balance of power; their work has threatened the patriarchal order.”