Shhh… But if there were objections flying around over the political declaration on pandemics, the U.N. General Assembly was noticeably quieter on another big issue: U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres’ proposals to sunset UNAIDS and merge UN Women with the U.N. Population Fund.
We wrote last week that no decision would be made at UNGA on UNAIDS’ future. But what about the UN Women-UNFPA merger? Crickets.
“We were expecting that this would be the moment — but so far, nothing,” Maria Antonieta Alcalde Castro, the director-general of the International Planned Parenthood Federation, told my colleague Elissa Miolene.
And the longer the silence stretches, the more questions there are about whether the merger will happen at all.
Indeed, several people I spoke to in the lead-up to UNGA believe the merger may not happen, particularly because several member states have expressed concerns about its implications and said they cannot support the proposal as it stands.
But if there’s no merger, then what?
That question remains unanswered. UN Women and UNFPA have already put forward alternatives to a merger. Ultimately, though, it’s up to U.N. member states to decide what comes next. For now, they’re not saying much.