Joint Nordic Statement at the UNICEF Executive Board Annual Session 2024 Item 5

(Check Against Delivery)

Thank you, Madam President

I have the honor to deliver this statement on behalf of the Nordic countries: Finland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, and my own country Denmark. We align ourselves with the joint statement as delivered by Greece.

At the outset, we would like to thank UNICEF and particularly Ms. Lauren Rumble and her team for their tireless efforts towards promoting the gender equality agenda across UNICEF’s work.

The Nordic countries would like to emphasize the need to ensure that women and girls, in all their diversity, continue to be at the heart of UNICEF’s work. UNICEF has a critical mandate to uphold the rights of every child and adolescent, including the sexual and reproductive health and rights of adolescent girls and women. As well as upholding and safeguarding the rights of women and girls with disabilities.

We commend UNICEF’s work on continually addressing underlying, discriminatory gender norms and power relations. We appreciate UNICEF’s efforts to promote gender-transformative approaches across its work.

In the face of multifaceted crises, including protracted conflicts and climate change, UNICEF’s work on mainstreaming gender equality across policies and programmes is more important than ever. However, against the backdrop of a global pushback on gender equality and rights, including stagnating progress on tackling biased gender norms – we are concerned about the lack of adequate resources to implement UNICEF’s targets.

Despite the challenges posed by limited resourcing, we applaud the strong results achieved, including the progress made as a result of the dedicated UNICEF Adolescent Girls’ Strategy. We would welcome more Member States to step up and support this work.

Allow us to highlight a four points and questions,

Firstly, we note the positive progress in incentivizing and enabling country offices to demonstrate programmatic shifts to gender-transformative approaches that the report highlights.

We encourage UNICEF country offices to collaborate closely with embassies of Nordic countries on gender programming and matters.

We would welcome further details on how UNICEF plans to accelerate these efforts, including an assessment of the capacity of the gender team and UNICEF to fully implement the ambitions of the Gender Action Plan?

And we would further welcome any recommendations on how Member States can support UNICEF’s work in implementing the Gender Action Plan.

Secondly, gender inequalities are often exacerbated in crises. Humanitarian planning and assistance must contribute to gender equality. We commend UNICEF’s dedication to placing girls and women at the center of emergency response and preparedness planning – which is evident by the numbers listed in the report. And we see that this work could be further strengthened.

UNICEF has performed well against targets under the Grand Bargain commitments on localization, while 8 per cent of humanitarian funding transferred to partners in 2023 went to organizations led by women. How does UNICEF plan to strengthen these efforts?

Thirdly, all girls and adolescent girls have the right to be protected from violence, exploitation, abuse, neglect and harmful practices. These rights are also valid in the digital sphere.

We underscore that mainstreaming a gender perspective in the financing, design, development, deployment, use, monitoring and evaluation of emerging technologies to prevent, identify and mitigate potential risks for all girls, especially adolescent girls, is key to ensuring their full and equal enjoyment of all human rights. We appreciate UNICEF’s work on this area and ensuring the digital safety of all children.

Lastly, we were encouraged by the strong calls by the Secretary-General in the System-Wide Gender Equality Acceleration Plan. How does UNICEF plan to work with the wider UN system on its implementation?

In closing, we reiterate the Nordic countries´ continued strong support for the important work of UNICEF to ensure that gender equality is at the heart of its work to protect and promote the rights and opportunities of all children and adolescents.