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The electronic version of this document has been prepared at the Fourth
World Conference on Women by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP)
in collaboration with the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women
Secretariat.
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AS WRITTEN


Address byDr. Wally N'Dow
Secretary-General of the
United Nations Conference on Human Settlements(Habitat II)
at theFourth World Conference on Women
Beijing, China
7 September 1995

TO BE CHECKED AGAINST DELIVERY

Address by DR, Wally N'Dow,


Madam President,
Madam Secretary General,
Excellencies,
Distinguished 
Delegates,
Ladies and Gentlemen: 

Not often is it given to us to share in a moment destined to be 
remembered by future generators as a turning point in the evolution of 
our global society. This historic conference is such a moment, and each 
and every one of us bears a heavy responsibility for ensuring that the 
outcome when we leave matches or exceeds the hopes we had when we 
arrived. 

To President Jiang Zeming and all our gracious hosts in Beijing, let me
thank you for your generous hospitality. To be in this  vibrant city and
to see at first-hand the evidence of what China is 
accomplishing in sustainable development and urbanization and in 
fighting poverty is an education for all of us engaged in the global 
fight for a better and more equitable life. I look forward so the 
opportunity of working closely with you in the preparations for the 
"City Summit" in Istanbul next year. 

I congratulate you Madam President, as indeed all the members of the 
Bureau who have been elected to guide the challenging work that occupies 
us in this conference. We are in good hands. 

And you, Madam Secretary General, you give inspiring validity to the old 
aphorism, Out of Africa, always something new.  It would be difficult to 
overstate the debt that is owed to you not only by those of us gathered 
in this hall, not only by women the world over, but by all of us -- men 
no less than women, children no less than adults for your dedication, 
your determination, your selfless and imaginative leadership in the 
cause of gender equity. I am proud to follow in your footsteps both as a 
fellow African and as the Secretary-General of the next United Nations 
conference. 

Beijing is the next to the last stop on a remarkable road that started 
in Rio and since then has gone through Vienna, Cairo and Copenhagen. 
From here the road now goes to Istanbul, where Habitat II, the United 
Nations Conference on Human Settlements - or the City Summit, as 
Secretary-General Boutros Boutros Ghali has called it -- will be held 
next June. And when it is over, the United Nations will have written a 
new economic and social agenda geared to needs of the world community in 
the new Millennium. 

That, Madam President, is why this Beijing Conference is so important, 
if not indispensable. Without Beijing, it would be difficult to complete 
our journey to Istanbul. Without it, the distance already traveled may 
well have been in vain, the road still ahead impassable. 

For women are at least fifty per cent of humankind, fifty per cent of 
its life and vitality, fifty per cent of its brainpower (an estimate, I 
should note, that this conference may well judge to be on the low 
side!). And if fifty per cent of the world's people are unable to 
fulfill their human potential, if their talent is wasted, how can we 
give force and meaning to the pioneering and courageous calls for action 
already sounded in Rio, Vienna, Cairo and Copenhagen? Without their full 
and equal participation, how can sustainable development be achieved, 
how can the environment be saved, how can economic equity be more than a 
cliché, how can universal human rights be more than a pious hope? 

I can but reiterate what others have said so eloquently in this hall and 
what must be said again and again -- women’s rights are human rights, 
and we dare never forget it. If we do, the world of the new century will 
remain tied to the failed habits of the past, the dangerous habits that 
Beijing must help break. That message must echo and reecho through the 
calls for action sounded here. There can be no retreat, no turning back. 

But equality and respect for women will not come about through 
platitudes and clichés. North and South, East and West, the answer put 
forward here must set down principles and recommendations, and it must 
reach out for accomplishment and implementation. That is what will help 
make the road to Istanbul from here not only passable, but one on which 
we will travel confident that Habitat II, even as you, will succeed in 
meeting the enormous challenge before it. 

Although it was not planned as such, Madam President. the mutuality of 
our concerns makes it logical for Habitat II to follow this Fourth World 
Conference on Women ill the remarkable continuum of United Nations 
conferences leading up to the new century. The world is urbanizing at a 
rate and at a pace never before dreamed possible. Our global population 
in urban areas is growing two and a half times faster than in rural 
areas -from 2.4 billion this year, the number living in cities will jump 
to 5 billion in 2025. 

It is a world in which women and dependent children are 
disproportionately at risk, the number joining the ranks of the poor 
soaring at a rate and at a pace never before equaled, most of them ill 
the developing countries. Of the 1.3 billion people - one in five--now 
existing in abject poverty, 70 per cent are women, the vast majority 
heads of households, with all too many of them having no rights of 
inheritance, no rights to security of tenure of land and property. And 
the evidence, moreover, suggests that urban and rural households headed 
by women are also likely to be poorer than those headed by men, their 
poverty compounded by the fact that, for most, their opportunities have 
been largely limited to marginalized, isolated situations with little or 
no prospect of a future. 

I do not want to recite statistics you know all too well. But it is here 
in particular that our roads cross; and, as the Secretary General of the 
Istanbul Conference, I want to assure you that this feminization of 
poverty will be one of the main issues before us at the City Summit." 
For as the number of poor in the world increases, adequate shelter for 
all is becoming an ever more difficult objective beyond the capability 
and resources of too many national and local governmental. And as so 
many speakers before me have emphasized, it is women who bear the brunt 
of it, who suffer the most their unequal. access to human settlements 
resources -- fifty per cent of the world’s population owns only a 
fraction of its property -- is a story this conference knows only too 
well. Indeed, it came to the fore ten years ago at the time of the Third 
Women’s Conference in 1385. and you will forgive me! I know, if I 
express pride in Habitat's pioneering role here ill prodding the world 
to pay attention, a role I am glad to say it is still playing. 

It matters little to the women affected, Madam President, whether they 
are denied their rights in rural areas or in cities. Whether they are 
homeless in a stagnating countryside or in overcrowded urban centers, or 
are forced to live ill dehumanizing slums and shantytowns that are an 
insult to the environment and the 2oth century, women struggle for 
equality ill the human settlements of the world. Glass ceiling and dark 
basement -- in industrialized or developing country -- in an 
interdependent world, can we permit the tyranny of the past to trample 
down the potential of the future, the potential just waiting to be 
tapped? 

Madam President, our aim at Istanbul, our specific mandate, is to find 
solutions to the multiplying problems that are now common to virtually 
all towns and cities -- decaying infrastructures, paralyzing traffic, 
growing crime, inadequate and unsafe housing, rampant homelessness, a 
growing scarcity of clean water, mounting waste and inadequate sewerage 
-- all the problems now common to l(local communities the world over. 
And then there are those who still live in the rural areas where the 
need for adequate shelter is no less acute and the yearning for a better 
life no less intense. They are no less our concern. 

But Madam President, I must interject here that the mission of Istanbul 
is not just to cope with the negative, not just to talk about what is 
wrong with our human settlement. It is also to emphasize the positive to 
help the cities of the world make the most of their critical role as the 
engines of production, the catalysts for progress. The new urban world 
is our planetary home of the future, and our task is to help make it a 
home and a world at peace with itself and the environment. 

If we are to succeed in Istanbul, therefore, we need the concerted 
effort that must be forthcoming from the entire-e international 
communality, from national. governments, NGOs, community based 
organizations, the private sector, centers of learning, groups and 
individuals, young and old from every level and sector of society. The 
job that must be done is the responsibility of every community, every 
neighborhood. Rio, where the road we are on started, gave the world that 
remarkable blueprint for sustainable development, Agenda 21. Our task at 
Habitat II will be to forge our own Urban Agenda 21, for Istanbul will 
not be the end of the journey, but rather a new beginning that will 
reflect and implement the actions called for at the unprecedented 
continuum of global conferences that have marked this closing decade of 
the century. 

But even that will not be enough unless nations everywhere come to 
recognize that the development and maintenance of the human habitat in a 
world at peace depends upon women and men working together in human 
solidarity. Without that solidarity the solutions will continue to evade 
us, whether the problems have to do with our human habitat, economic, 
social and political equity or the life and death issues of war and 
peace. Beijing must help point us in this direction. 

For even as you here in Beijing, we who are now organizing the Istanbul 
Conference are determined that the needs of both women and men are taken 
into consideration and met in gender sensitive ways. We must go together 
from Beijing to Istanbul. What is started here must be put into practice 
there. 

There can be no small footpath for women running on the side of the road 
from Beijing to Istanbul. The road must be wide enough for all of us to 
travel together in the mainstream of traffic, women shoulder to shoulder 
with men “in the grand light of human creatures.” That must be Beijing's 
legacy to Istanbul - and to the future. Only together will we have the 
knowledge and skills and, yes, only together will we muster the 
resources to do the job. Only together, here and in Istanbul, will we 
bring about the changes needed to transform our world. 

Let us seize the opportunity. Let us seize the moment. In the words of 
the poet, let us "seize the day."