IPPF recognizes the need for the long-overdue need for UN reform and to transform the institution to more effectively respond to real-world challenges and to the needs of the peoples it exists to serve. A UN ‘fit for purpose’ must change the colonial legacies and power imbalances on which it was created. And any reform must strengthen the UN’s ability to uphold its purpose and values and be truly long-term visionary - not dismantle the organization or deviate from those principles.
The UN80 Initiative held out the promise of a UN that could “do more, more effectively - ensuring the UN system is better aligned to meet rising global needs with unity, agility, and purpose”. In the context of the proposed merger of UN Women and UNFPA, the UN leadership argued that a key goal would be “to protect progress on gender equality and SRHR against backlash”. Throughout the process, IPPF and other feminist civil society organizations and member states insisted that the assessment must be grounded in robust data and analysis and that any reform must protect the critical mandates and normative roles of both.
Following several months of delay, the ‘Strategic Merger Assessment of UNFPA and UN Women: Final Consolidated Report’ was released on 24 April. The report proposes a merger of UNFPA and UN Women as a key ‘‘strategic option’ and three ways it could look: 1) One single entity. 2) Integration under UNFPA, 3) Integration under UN Women. It concludes that a single entity is the best way forward.
IPPF is alarmed that the proposal not only fails to fulfil the imperative of the UN80 reform, but that it would have detrimental impacts on the UN's work on gender equality and sexual and reproductive health and rights and human rights for all. We are deeply concerned that institutional consolidation will dilute normative authority, disrupt operational infrastructure, and weaken the UN’s ability to translate global commitments into national action — at precisely the moment these commitments face intensified challenges. This proposed merger is not an abstract exercise - it is about peoples’ lives and the UN’s continued relevance for those it exists to serve: women, girls, indigenous peoples, people with disabilities, LGBTQI+ and other marginalised and underserved communities.
IPPF supports meaningful UN reform that makes the institution more responsive to the people it serves. However, the rushed UN80 process risks undermining that goal by advancing major changes, including the proposed merger of UNFPA and UN Women, without fully considering the impact on people’s lives. As a key UNFPA partner, IPPF is deeply concerned this could disrupt lifesaving sexual and reproductive health services, particularly for women and girls in underserved communities, and weaken decades of progress on sexual and reproductive rights and gender equality. For reform to be credible, it must be driven by our communities needs, not politics. - Maria Antonieta Alcalde Castro, IPPF General Director
PF calls on governments, including key donors to UNFPA and UN Women and members of the UN Women and UNFPA Executive Boards, to:
- Reject the proposal in the report to merge UNFPA and UN Women into one single entity as the only ‘strategic option’. As it stands, the assessment report provides no clear, convincing rationale nor cost-benefit analysis to support such a proposal. The report identifies several core risks, such as reopening/diluting mandates, disruption to programmatic activities and unclear funding continuation, yet does not provide any comprehensive risk mitigation strategies for this.
- Raise concern about the expedited timelines: This process has been pushed through by UN leadership with unacceptable speed and without proper consideration of the consistent concerns and questions raised by Member States and civil society actors. In light of the monumental impact such a merger would have, it cannot be expedited without proper consultations to gather substantive inputs from civil society and those who will be impacted by the decision at country level and comprehensive responses to concerns raised, including on programmatic, normative and mandate levels.
IPPF’s key concerns in the assessment report
Programmatic and country level impact
Despite consistent requests from Member States and civil society, the assessment reports lack a comprehensive analysis of the impact on country, operational and programmatic levels. It is based on “publicly available info, desk reviews, interviews and hypothesis testing”.
The report states that continuity of life-saving services would be safeguarded, including by protection of operational access, supply chains, and surge capacity in fragile and crisis-affected contexts. Yet the report also identifies that the merger could disrupt programme implementation and that the risk is “particularly acute for essential and life-saving functions, including the procurement and delivery of reproductive health commodities, humanitarian surge capacity”. This ambivalence raises questions about the extent to which the proposed safeguards adequately address the risks identified.
As the world largest provider of sexual and reproductive health services - working in over 150 countries in the world - and an implementing partner for UNFPA, IPPF sees imminent risks for the millions of people who depend on access to lifesaving care. In the context of the current political landscape and severe funding constraints, the proposal to merge UNFPA and UN Women would further destabilise service delivery for women, girls and marginalized communities most in need, including in humanitarian context. The dismantling of USAID funding has already resulted in a $52 million supply gap across 21 countries, many of them humanitarian or fragile settings. A merger could exacerbate this gap if partnership agreements and commodity pipelines are renegotiated, and if abortion‑related and family‑planning commodities are deprioritised.
The UNFPA Supplies Partnership is the world's largest dedicated procurer of family planning and reproductive health commodities, with an annual budget of $127.5 million supporting 54 programme countries. Of these, 45 countries have direct operational overlap with IPPF Member Associations, meaning a merger-related disruption would not be abstract, but will be immediately felt on the ground. IPPF Member Associations alone receive an estimated $8–$10 million in commodities annually through UNFPA Supplies, either via direct donations from the Partnership or through their respective Ministries of Health. These are essential for IPPF Member Association’s delivery of critical sexual and reproductive health services to the communities we serve. Any institutional disruption, including transition-related procurement delays, renegotiation of host country agreements, or supply chain authority gaps, would put this flow of life-saving commodities at direct risk, disproportionately affecting the women and girls in the most underserved settings who have no alternative source of supply.
Continuity of life-saving services, in particular in humanitarian and crisis settings, is not an ancillary implementation issue: it is a core test of whether reform strengthens or weakens delivery. IPPF is deeply concerned that the assessment report fails to comprehensively outline how life-saving services would be continued.
Any transition period is likely to create authority gaps, delays in procurement decision-making, or ambiguity in operational accountability — all of which disrupt time-sensitive SRHR delivery. In the current geopolitical context, where disruptions are already impacting millions of people who rely on essential sexual and reproductive health services, merging UNFPA and UN Women could expose a new entity to further coordinated political pressure, funding conditionality, or governance deadlock, with severe risks for restricting life-saving interventions. This is particularly a key risk following the Trump administration's America First Global Health Strategy and expanded Global Gag rule, which are impacting country-level and global funding and support for reproductive health supplies, including family planning.
A merger would likely require entering into new host country agreements with countries in which UNFPA and UN Women work. In the current political environment, this would bring challenges impacting operational capacity that could disproportionately affect fragile and crisis settings where service continuity depends on rapid decision-making and decentralized operational authority.
Beyond service delivery, UNFPA functions as a key technical and normative partner to national governments in the design and monitoring of sexual and reproductive health policies. In many countries, including in Latin America and the Caribbean, UNFPA's country offices serve as irreplaceable interlocutors between international standards and national health systems. A merger carries serious risk of weakening this function, precisely at a moment when governments need evidence-based guidance to withstand regressive political pressures.
In countries like Colombia, for example, where UNFPA has played a decisive role in designing and co-implementing national public policies on sexual and reproductive health, including in the context of the peace process and the migration crisis driven by Venezuelan displacement, a merger would not merely disrupt an institution: it would destabilize years of policy-building and programmatic gains that cannot be rebuilt overnight.
The flawed argument of reducing “fragmentation”
The report argues that a new merged entity would reduce fragmentation as a key goal. It mentions that “Under current conditions this fragmentation is not neutral. It is becoming a growing constraint on the system’s ability to project political weight, ensure continuity across contexts, and demonstrate impact at scale.”
As already highlighted by feminist civil society, UNFPA and UNW’s mandates were created and designed to work together, but each has a distinct mandate approved by Member States. This point is central: complementarity was a deliberate choice by Member States to strengthen delivery across different but interconnected functions. Across the UN system, many entities operate with overlapping areas of expertise without calls for structural consolidation. While we support increased collaboration and agility, including at country levels, improved coordination and impact could be achieved through strengthened accountability frameworks and effective collaboration mechanisms, rather than through organizational restructuring alone.
There is a risk that institutional consolidation, if not designed with explicit safeguards, could dilute normative authority, disrupt specialized operational infrastructure, and weaken the UN’s ability to translate global commitments into national action — at precisely the moment these commitments face intensified challenge. Decisions about structure are therefore political decisions — influencing whose priorities are amplified, whose expertise is preserved, and how mandates evolve over time.
Risk of mandate dilution
The report confirms that any restructure and merger of UNFPA and UN Women would require a decision by the UN General Assembly. This means that the decision-making process will be put in the hands of UN Member States. The assessment report mentions that “mandate negotiation is a non-negotiable analytical condition”. During the Women Deliver Conference, on April 27, the Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohamed confirmed that if there is a risk of any mandates being opened up, the decision will no longer be on the table. However, in this political moment, this strategy seems not only risky, but politically extremely dangerous. Once the process is in the hands of Member States the chances of actually “pull the proposal” will no longer be at the authority of the UN Secretary-General. Recently, in the Commission on the Status of Women, we witnessed how the United States attempted to push its extremely regressive national policies into multilateral spaces by trying to re-define “gender” as meaning “men and women” and re-open the Beijing Declaration and Programme of Action.
The ICPD Programme of Action and the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action represent hard-won, multilaterally negotiated commitments that have guided decades of progress on sexual and reproductive rights and gender equality. UNFPA and UN Women are not merely implementing agencies — they are the custodial institutions responsible for tracking progress against these commitments and holding states accountable. Merging them creates serious institutional risk to the monitoring, promotion, and defense of these frameworks, particularly at a moment when state and non-state actors are actively seeking to re-interpret or dilute agreed language.
The many recent attempts to dilute agreed language, including recently at the Commission on the Status of Women are not isolated incidents — it is a warning. Moving forward with a merger would risk opening up to negotiating a new mandate in the General Assembly, which would be highly exposed to this kind of regressive pressure and attempts to leave out key groups from protection and care. To truly protect the mandates, the ICPD PoA and the Beijing PfA, there is a need for clear legal and institutional safeguards in place.
Role of civil society
A deeply concerning aspect of the UNFPA–UN Women merger assessment process, which IPPF and many other civil society organizations have repeatedly raised, and which is also reflected in the report itself, is the limited and instrumental way in which civil society participation is conceived. Rather than recognizing civil society as a strategic actor with substantive expertise and a legitimate role in shaping decisions, the report largely approaches engagement from a communications and stakeholder management perspective, without assigning civil society any meaningful power to influence the decision-making process or the implementation pathway. This tokenistic approach is unfortunately consistent with how the process has unfolded from the outset. It is particularly problematic given that civil society is not a peripheral actor, but one of the key constituencies responsible for advancing, implementing, and sustaining gender equality and SRHR mandates on the ground. Excluding these voices from genuine decision-making undermines both the legitimacy and the effectiveness of any proposed reform.
Protection against backlash
Throughout the UN80 process, the UN leadership has continuously argued that a key goal of a merged entity would be to “protect progress on gender equality and SRHR” against backlash. The assessment mentions the opportunity to have a “stronger, unified global voice” which could elevate the influence, clarity and political power of the UN’s work on gender equality and SRHR - speaking with one unmistakable voice at global, regional and country levels. The report also states that greater resilience in a challenging environment could be achieved through a combined institution.
While we see merit in making country-level engagements more agile and coordinated, consolidation does not automatically translate into greater political strength. Concentrating normative leadership, coordination authority, gender equality and population data functions and operational SRHR delivery within one structure increases the possibility of any political attack, funding shock, reputational controversy, or governance deadlock. Rather than dispersing risk across complementary entities, consolidation may create a focal point for coordinated political pressure, including attempts to reopen agreed language, restrict funding streams, or redefine operational mandates.
Funding
IPPF is deeply concerned that the assessment report does not provide a cost benefit analysis, despite consistent requests from Member States and CSOs. Such an analysis should be a bare minimum requirement on the basis of which further discussions can be held. The report mentions that a ‘full-fledged cost-benefit analysis of both transition costs and recurring efficiencies will only be possible once a specific pathway has been selected and organizational design options have been developed’.
The preliminary cost analysis in the report shows that estimated annual savings from a merger would represent a relatively small share of the combined budgets approximately 1.4% to 1.7%, “in the range of “USD 32-38 million once integration is fully completed”. This could take several years. However, transition costs are expected to be “up to USD 110 million”. The report also notes that UNFPA is 100 % voluntary funded and UN Women primarily funded through earmarked contributions for ¾ of its work . Lastly, the assessment team includes that “it is the belief of the assessment team that any savings generated through a merger would need to be redeployed within a new organization, to enable it to deliver on what would be a larger combined mandate”. This data leaves us with a fundamental question: What is the financial benefit of this merger, where savings were presented as a core premise for proposing it in the first place?
The report also shows that donor confidence for “both core and non-core funding are closely linked to mandate clarity, institutional continuity, and confidence in delivery arrangements”. The top 20 donors accounted for approximately 70 % of total contributions to UNFPA and 85 % to UN Women. It further mentions that “as a result, any perceived dilution of mandates or disruption to delivery frameworks carries a heightened risk of donor disengagement, increased earmarking, or reduced funding levels. However, given the current financial landscape, these risks may materialize even in a status quo scenario.” This raises serious concerns about how a new entity would be able to ensure the same level of funding, not to mention make a compelling case for new donors to come on board.
Conclusion
The assessment report does not provide any evidence, data, cost-benefit analysis or convincing financial arguments for why the merger of UNFPA and UN Women will make “the UN deliver more consistent and measurable impact at scale for women and girls, including adolescents and youth, on the ground”. On the contrary, the lack of evidence and data underpins the fear that this is a politically motivated process; aiming to undermine peoples’ rights, hard-won gains and weaken UN institutions that specifically focus on SRHR and gender equality for all.
While IPPF stands ready to support genuine, transformative and visionary UN reforms, dismantling the key structures in a moment of intense political backlash is not only risky, it can be deadly. For thousands of people relying on basic health services and whose rights and dignity are already under attack.
We therefore call on Member States to reject the proposal to merge UNFPA and UN Women, to insist that careful considerations and timelines are given, and that - for the UN80 process to be truly effective and visionary - it must be system-wide and grounded in realities for the peoples it was established to serve. Any reform processes that undermine transparency and collaboration are counterproductive to achieving SRHR, gender equality, and human rights for all.
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