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New York -- Paula Donovan has long had a dream - and today she is pushing it forward, and finding new allies among former skeptics, while shaking things up. After working for years at the United Nations on women's issues and causes such as breastfeeding, she teamed up with her friend and ex UN-colleague Stephen Lewis, to launch a new international advocacy agency, AIDS-Free World. The duo have alsoe proposed a bold vision: a new UN agency for women, one with major financial and political clout.
"The primary goal is reparations -- repairing the United Nations," Donovan explains. "It was a very male-dominated world back in the 1940s and it was acceptable to have a structure consider the needs and rights of men that didn't pay any attention to women. The concerns of women are simply not on the table."
"Right now the combined entities in UN that deal with women have roughly 200 million," she explains., "The UNIFEMs.. and others... these are the dedicated women's entities -- if you put all those together, it still wouldn't equal the operating budget for UNICEF in Ethiopia."
So why, if the UN is a chauvinist dinosaur system that fails women so spectacularly and for so long, would she have us dreaming of a radical UN reform?
"It's counterintuitive--there's no doubt about it," she admits, laughing. But about the UN, she says pragmatically, "You can't live with it and can't live without it. Without this enormous facilitator that is the UN, you're just working in your isolated pockets."
"I'm convinced that a lot of ways the UN doesn't work and doesn't function in a lot of areas is because it's a dinosaur operating in the 21st century," Donovan adds," and I'm convinced that having a women's agency would change that - and that's the only hope I have for the UN actually."
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More Choice Words from our video conversation with Paula Donovan:
"As people listen to the basic argument and the premise that we are making a better UN by having a women's agency--it's not simply, you know, 'justice and fairness, and it's our turn' - it's really that anyone who has any up close relationship with the UN knows that it needs to be fixed. And when you pose that this might just be a very fast, very efficient, effective way to fix it, the argument is resonating." - Paula Donovan
Brief Bio about Donovan: Paula Donovan has spent two decades involved in health, economic, and social policy in developing countries. In the early '90s, she worked at UNICEF and ran their global advocacy campaign for breastfeeding. She late served as chief aide to UNICEF's deputy executive director, then East and Southern Africa's Regional AIDS advisor for UNICEF, and spent four years on the job in Kenya.
For more about Donovan and AIDS-Free world, a full bio and links, go to "Guests & Topics."
"The primary goal is reparations -- repairing the United Nations," Donovan explains. "It was a very male-dominated world back in the 1940s and it was acceptable to have a structure consider the needs and rights of men that didn't pay any attention to women. The concerns of women are simply not on the table."
"Right now the combined entities in UN that deal with women have roughly 200 million," she explains., "The UNIFEMs.. and others... these are the dedicated women's entities -- if you put all those together, it still wouldn't equal the operating budget for UNICEF in Ethiopia."
So why, if the UN is a chauvinist dinosaur system that fails women so spectacularly and for so long, would she have us dreaming of a radical UN reform?
"It's counterintuitive--there's no doubt about it," she admits, laughing. But about the UN, she says pragmatically, "You can't live with it and can't live without it. Without this enormous facilitator that is the UN, you're just working in your isolated pockets."
"I'm convinced that a lot of ways the UN doesn't work and doesn't function in a lot of areas is because it's a dinosaur operating in the 21st century," Donovan adds," and I'm convinced that having a women's agency would change that - and that's the only hope I have for the UN actually."
<hr>
More Choice Words from our video conversation with Paula Donovan:
"As people listen to the basic argument and the premise that we are making a better UN by having a women's agency--it's not simply, you know, 'justice and fairness, and it's our turn' - it's really that anyone who has any up close relationship with the UN knows that it needs to be fixed. And when you pose that this might just be a very fast, very efficient, effective way to fix it, the argument is resonating." - Paula Donovan
"We have to have for women what we have for men, which is basically whatever sector you are looking at, has a male perspective and a male setting of priorities and a male determination to fulfill the needs and goals that males care about. We need to rush toward that goal -- we can't go incrementally toward that goal."- Paula Donovan
"[We] made the argument that said, 'You can reform every part of the United Nations structure and you still won't get anywhere because it won't reflect the world.' And we got a lot of positive response from the High Level panel. They came up with their final recommendations, and chief among them was that United Nations needed to revamp itself and become an institution that does reflect that."
Brief Bio about Donovan: Paula Donovan has spent two decades involved in health, economic, and social policy in developing countries. In the early '90s, she worked at UNICEF and ran their global advocacy campaign for breastfeeding. She late served as chief aide to UNICEF's deputy executive director, then East and Southern Africa's Regional AIDS advisor for UNICEF, and spent four years on the job in Kenya.
For more about Donovan and AIDS-Free world, a full bio and links, go to "Guests & Topics."
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