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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


FOURTH WORLD CONFERENCE ON WOMEN
8 September 1995 Beijing, China
PLENARY SESSION

STATEMENT by Mr. Ji Chaozhu
Under-Secretary-General
Department for Development Support and Management Services (DDSMS)
UNITED NATIONS


Madam Chairperson,
Your Excellencies,
distinguished colleagues,
ladies and gentlemen,

I am profoundly honoured to have this opportunity of addressing the
Plenary Session of this Fourth World Conference on Women, and would like
to extend my warmest congratulations to you, Madam Chairperson, and to
the legions of men and women who have worked so selflessly and so
diligently to bring to fruition a gathering of this magnitude and global
significance.

It is also with considerable personal pride that I return to this city
to attend this landmark conference. The Government of China is likewise
to be congratulated for the commitment it has shown in hosting this
momentous event. China, in common with many other countries, has
demonstrated a keen awareness of the potential contribution of women in
influencing the political, social and cultural realities of today's
rapidly changing world. China will therefore doubtless enrich, as will
other nations, the debate of this conference, and be enriched by it.

The issues before us have aroused intense interest and passionate debate
in the many of the preparatory international meetings to this
Conference. There can be little doubt that the United Nations has played
an invaluable role in continuing to take the lead in what must be
considered as one of the most pressing and powerful concerns of our
generation - namely, how to address the long-standing and deep-rooted
gender inequities in almost all countries of the world. We are
addressing here not transitory issues but long-standing, widespread and
disturbing phenomena of injustice and discrimination against women,
which manifest themselves in different ways in the poorer than in the
wealthier countries, but with consequences of equal significance
wherever they occur. In the poorest of nations, these effects have taken
the form of overburdening women with responsibilities for agricultural
production for the household and market, in addition to their main
responsibilities for raising and feeding families, fetching water wood,
and undertaking a host of other tasks. At the same time, women are
required to subsist in societies which discriminate persistently against
them in education and employment and often prevent their movement away
from lives of servitude and degradation.

This has led to immeasurable losses for countries in terms of
unfulfilled economic and social potential, and to pain and suffering for
women themselves in terms of unfulfilled ambitions. These losses are
felt by us all.

I take pride in the fact that the predecessors to the Department for
Development Support and Management Services - the main locus of
technical operational activities at the field level in the United
Nations Secretariat - took up the challenge of addressing the concerns
of women in developing countries many years ago, and was the first in
the Secretariat to establish a special Task Force to focus on this
issue. We have taken as a premise that although women have always played
a central role in the economic and social life of developing countries
and countries in transition, they have, nevertheless, all too often been
excluded from development efforts. This exclusion has had two very
detrimental effects: women have not benefited from development efforts,
and, more importantly, their potential contribution to development has
been largely neglected. Whole societies are impoverished by the failure
of women to realize their full potential because of the obstacles they
face.

On this latter point, I believe that the economic impact of many past
development efforts was diminished by a failure to fully recognize the
significant economic and social roles of women and their capacity for
influencing the planning and implementation of field programmes, not to
mention their potential for enhancing the management of the development
process as a whole. It is increasingly recognized that gains by women in
the labour force and in terms of political participation have increased
only slightly; they must have greater access to economic and political
opportunities. They must be full partners in policy-making and decision-
making, involved in economic and political structures which can allow
them to effect and manage change.

Our approach in redressing this has evolved. With a wide range of
technical capacity at hand, we have sought to adopt a more integrated
and multidisciplinary stance, enabling us to devise thematic programmes
with a greater focus on alleviating poverty, promoting sustainable
development at the grassroots level, and placing women at the forefront
in management and decision-making. This approach applies equally at the
highest national levels as at the local levels, where participatory and
community-based approaches are seen as effective modalities for change
and progress.

The range of programmes now being undertaken by the Department have
included encouraging women entrepreneurs, creating support networks for
women in rural communities with a view to increasing productivity and
income, efforts to adapt appropriate technology to local needs in the
energy and water fields, marketing, financial management, and
administration, to develop management skills. I take pride in the fact
that at our instigation, the ECOSOC Committee on Natural Resources
included, for the first time, an agenda item on women and small-scale
mining at its session four years ago. We have established a Social
Development Management Branch to focus and improve our capacity to
design and deliver programmes for the empowerment of women in society.
The objective of our reinvigorated Task Force has been to bring together
the diverse initiatives being undertaken in support of women's concerns
in a wide spectrum of technical fields including economic and social
policy formulation, national and regional planning, community
development, privatization and entrepreneurial development, governance
and administration, and natural resources and energy planning and
management.

Let me cite a few examples of the kinds of activities we are now
supporting. In a UNDP-funded regional project to assess the role of
women in development in the CEE and CIS countries in the wake of
economic and social reforms, we recognize that in the process of
restructuring and privatization, social safety nets and family welfare
protection systems have suffered acutely, with particularly serious
implications for women, children and disadvantaged groups, including
single-parent families. We are reviewing the special role to be played
by Gender in Development Units in these countries in such circumstances.
This project will take specific steps to ensure that the recommendations
deriving from this Conference are implemented and followed up. In
Burkina Faso, a UNDP/DDSMS project supports local initiatives for the
sustainable development of water resources in rural areas; the active
participation of women in the 200 public meetings, and their motivation
towards small-scale gardening for consumption and income-generation
reflects the growing trend towards the empowerment of rural women in
managing local resources. We have programmes promoting the accelerated
advancement of women in the civil service and in the development of
entrepreneurship, including a multi-module technical cooperation
programme for entrepreneurs - EMPRETEC - which encourages the
participation of women in small and medium-scale enterprises.

In pursing these activities, we have greatly valued collaboration with
our partners - in particular with UNDP, with specialized agencies, with
NGOs at all levels, and with the private sector, among many others. It
is essential that these partnerships be strengthened and expanded.

Madam Chairperson, as the Department responsible for operationalizing
development concepts, and for providing the linkage between political
debate and the social and economic realities at the field level, I
believe we have an important role to play in terms of ensuring
meaningful and relevant follow-up to global Conferences such as this.

I thank you.