His Excellency António Guterres
Ccs: Her Excellency Amina Mohammed, Deputy Secretary-General, United Nations
Guy Ryder, Under-Secretary-General for Policy, United Nations
Diene Keita, Under-Secretary-General and Executive Director, United Nations Population Fund
Sima Sami Bahous, Under-Secretary-General and Executive Director, UN Women Winnie
Byanyima, Under-Secretary-General and Executive Director, UNAIDS
Catherine Russell, Under-Secretary-General and Executive Director, UNICEF
Alexander de Croo, Under-Secretary-General and Administrator, UNDP
Volker Türk, Under-Secretary-General and High Commissioner for Human Rights
Barham Salih,Under-Secretary-General and High Commissioner for Refugees
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director-General, WHO Khaled El-Nany, Director-General, UNESCO
Ajay Banga, President, World Bank
Re: Safeguarding sexual and reproductive health and rights in the UN80 Reform
We are writing on behalf of the Global South Coalition for SRHR and Development Justice, and a group of CSOs allied in support of sexual and reproductive health and rights. This letter is endorsed not only by civil society organizations, but also by activists, researchers, practitioners, and advocates who support the protection and advancement of SRHR. As you know, SRHR have long been recognized by the UN and its member states as an essential prerequisite to achieving gender equality and development. As the UN80 reform process explores potential structural improvements—including a possible merger between UNFPA and UN Women—we are writing to urge you to safeguard the integrity of the UN’s SRHR mandate.
SRHR has historically required dedicated leadership, specialized technical capacity, and clear institutional anchoring to ensure coherence across global norms, national implementation, and service delivery. Experience shows that when SRHR is absorbed into broader gender or development mandates, it risks being deprioritized, underfunded, or rendered politically invisible. While the Coalition has not taken a position on the merger proposal, regardless of whether it proceeds, the current moment offers a rare and urgent opportunity to institutionalize SRHR as a strong, visible, well-resourced, and politically protected mandate at the center of the UN development system.
In this spirit, we offer a set of proposals (attached) that focus on strengthening the UN’s work on SRHR. We ask you, UN leaders, and member states to:
- Guarantee ring-fenced and proportionate financing for SRHR, maintaining current programmatic allocations and safeguarding budgets during periods of fiscal contraction.
- Strengthen political and technical leadership for SRHR and ensure high-level political visibility, including:
- An open, competitive selection of the Executive Director for any new or merged entity;
- Appointing a UN Secretary-General’s Special Envoy for SRHR;
- Preserving SRHR technical leadership; and
- Build inclusive, accountable governance for SRHR leadership, including:
- Civil society seats on the Executive Board, with enhanced Global South representation;
- A dedicated Youth Advisory Panel to ensure sustained youth leadership and accountability.
- Mandate robust SRHR accountability mechanisms, including:
- Annual reporting to the Commission on Population and Development (CPD) and ECOSOC or the General Assembly;
- A strengthened State of World Population report that tracks policies and programmes, not only population trends.
- Strengthen system-wide SRHR coherence across the UN, with UNFPA, UNW (or any new or merged entity), HRP, WHO, UNAIDS, UNICEF, UNDP, and the World Bank.
- Rebuild and expand global data systems, filling the gaps left by the dismantling of the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) and ensuring that SRHR indicators remain comparable, disaggregated, and consistently collected.
- Embed SRHR explicitly within development justice and the right to development, linking SRHR to economic inclusion, social equity, climate resilience, and digital access.
At a moment when SRHR is under threat, it is critical that any UN80 reform process preserve and protect this mandate to ensure continued progress towards the SDGs, as well as ICPD and Beijing, and the full realization of human rights for all. These actions would help to codify SRHR as a stand-alone, non-negotiable mandate in any future institutional arrangement. No structural reform should advance if it risks weakening or reducing existing mandates, technical capacity, or accountability for SRHR.
Finally, given the complexity and sensitivity of the UN80 reform, transparency is essential to build trust and prevent unintended consequences for SRHR. We call on you to ensure clear communication, open consultations, and publicly shared criteria for assessing risks and opportunities to help ensure that decisions are evidence-informed and subject to broad scrutiny.
We stand ready to work with you to ensure that SRHR remains highly visible, well resourced, and technically grounded in any future institutional arrangement.
Please click here to see the list of signatories.