UN Women is known to be under-resourced, particularly in terms of women, peace, and security. We welcome the recommendations for the assistant secretary-general role, particularly to ensure that there's a UN Women representative who is able to attend all the senior management meetings that bring together all of the different UN entities.
In the lead-up to the high-level review, we were advocating for increased resourcing of UN Women but also increased resourcing of gender expertise within the departments of political affairs and peacekeeping. We think there need to be higher levels of gender expertise at headquarters, mirrored across all of the different peacekeeping and special political missions.
As I mentioned before, the resourcing of gender expertise across the UN is inconsistent. We're not privy to those negotiations, but we do know that even in a mission where gender advisers have been mandated, they're not necessarily deployed, or if they are deployed, they end up filling a different position once they're actually in the mission.
Our call to all the member states who sit on the Fifth Committee, for instance, the budgeting committee at the UN, is that there is a need for ongoing gender expertise at headquarters across the different UN entities and field missions. Very similar to the overarching problems with funding of the agenda, a lot of the gender experts aren't part of the core budgets. The mission leadership or even departments are having to systematically fundraise for these positions as well, because they're not part of the formal structure of a department. We think that's problematic as well, for similar reasons, because there's no long-term continuity in the provision of senior-level gender expertise.