CIVICUS speaks with Cynthia Saxena, Global Advocacy Consultant at Fòs Feminista, a global feminist alliance for reproductive justice, about the United Nations’ (UN) financial crisis and its controversial restructuring proposals.

Facing a deepening financial crisis, the UN is weighing changes that include merging UN Women and the UN Population Fund (UNFPA). These are two of the system’s smallest agencies but are among its most targeted. Critics warn that consolidation would hollow out specialised mandates and cut off vital support to feminist and women’s rights movements when they need it most. In a new report, Fòs Feminista makes the case against these proposals, calling on states to safeguard institutional expertise and guarantee meaningful civil society participation in UN decision-making.

What’s driving the UN’s financial crisis, and who bears the costs?

The crisis is real and serious, but it is also, in important ways, manufactured. It’s a crisis of non-payment, not inefficiency. As of late 2025, only 151 of 193 member states had paid their assessed contributions, with 95 per cent of arrears owed by the USA. The UN returned US$114 million in credits to member states in arrears while being unable to spend US$255 million due to late payments. That’s not a structural problem; it’s a political choice being dressed up as a fiscal one.

When you look at who bears the consequences, the picture becomes deeply troubling. The human rights pillar, already receiving less than seven per cent of the regular UN budget, faces cuts of 15.2 per cent, steeper than any other pillar. The agencies singled out for merger are the UNFPA and UN Women, two of the smallest in the UN system, while larger agencies with far greater programmatic overlap face no consolidation proposals at all.

This tells us that the driving logic is political, not technical. What can’t be defeated through negotiations at the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) or the Commission on Population and Development is being quietly dismantled through budget mechanisms. The financial crisis creates the cover, but the targeting is deliberate.

The timing of this proposal is not incidental. At CSW70, held from 9 to 19 March, we witnessed something unprecedented: the complete breakdown of consensus, which forced the first vote in the Commission’s history. A small number of delegations coordinated efforts to strip references to sexual and reproductive health and rights and other established human rights standards from the meeting’s main output document, the agreed conclusions. Those efforts failed, but the session didn’t end there. A further resolution attempted to redefine gender in narrow, binary terms, seeking to rewrite the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action. It was stopped, but the fact that it reached the floor at all is cause for serious concern.

These are not isolated incidents: they are part of a coordinated, escalating effort to dismantle decades of agreed human rights standards from within the multilateral system itself. If the pressure to erode these standards is this intense at the normative level, the answer can’t be to simultaneously weaken the institutional architecture that upholds them.

This is happening against a backdrop of profound gender backsliding. Governments are rolling back reproductive rights. Civic space for feminist and women’s rights organisations is shrinking. Hard-won legal protections are being reversed. The UN is supposed to be a counterweight to these trends, not a reflection of them.

What are your main objections to the merger?

Our greatest concern is mandate dilution. The Secretary-General and Deputy Secretary-General have assured us they would not proceed if mandates were weakened. We appreciate those assurances, but assurances are not architecture. The proposal as designed makes mandate dilution not just possible but likely, as becomes clear when we examine the four core assumptions driving it.

The first is that the merger will generate cost savings. It will not. The liquidity crisis is driven by US$1.586 billion in unpaid contributions. Restructuring two agencies does nothing to recover that money.

The second is that these mandates are primarily about women and girls. They are not. Sexual and reproductive health and rights and gender equality are foundational to development. Maternal health keeps families out of poverty, population planning underpins national infrastructure and climate resilience, and women’s political participation improves governance for entire societies. Framing them otherwise is a political move, not an analytical one.

The third is that significant duplication exists between the two agencies. Their mandates, funding streams, government counterparts and technical expertise are, in fact, substantively different. The evidence shows they share 20 to 30 per cent programmatic overlap in areas like gender-based violence and adolescent health, but they approach these issues from entirely distinct technical angles that complement rather than duplicate each other. The remaining 70 to 80 per cent of each agency’s work is unique. Compare this to other agencies with far greater overlap that face no merger proposals, such as the Food and Agriculture Organization and the World Food Programme, which share 50 to 60 per cent overlap, and the logic breaks down.

The fourth argument is that a merger would improve coordination. But coordination failures stem from unclear roles and accountability, not from the existence of two separate institutions. Merging them relocates the problem inside a larger bureaucracy while eliminating the specialised capacity that makes each agency effective.

What would a merger mean in practice?

It would mean losing specialised capacities that cannot simply be absorbed into a larger entity.

For UN Women, this means dismantling the UN System-wide Action Plan on Gender Equality, the only mechanism holding over 40 UN entities accountable for integrating gender into their budgets, policies and programmes. It also means losing its standard-setting role on women’s rights and cutting off direct support to feminist movements, including through the UN Trust Fund to End Violence Against Women.

For the UNFPA, the picture is equally alarming. Its population planning work, the only formal UN mandate covering census operations, civil registration and demographic intelligence, would be left without an institutional home. Its contraceptive supply chains, which 46 countries depend on, would face serious disruption at a moment when global health financing is already shrinking. Its humanitarian work reached 10 million people across 59 crisis-affected countries in 2024. That scale is only possible with dedicated institutional infrastructure.

What gets lost is not redundancy. It’s irreplaceable expertise built over decades, serving communities that have no alternative if these systems fail.

What role has civil society played in this process?

Civil society has been sidelined from the beginning, treated as a recipient of decisions rather than a participant in making them. A task force conducted an independent assessment and presented it to both agencies’ executive boards. Civil society was not consulted. We received a single briefing on 15 December, well after the work was already underway. That was not consultation; it was just a notification.

Yet civil society has not been passive. Feminist organisations across regions have been convening, coordinating and making their opposition heard through every available channel. We have sent letters to the deputy secretary-general and to leadership and executive boards at both agencies. The message has been consistent: we understand the risks, we have seen what mandate dilution looks like in practice and we are against this merger.

What should states do?

What we are asking of states is straightforward: exercise the authority you hold. No merger can proceed without your approval. But they must act with full awareness of what is being proposed and why.

Question the assessment. Ask why the 2023 independent expert review, which recommended strengthening both agencies, was not referenced, and who defined the problem this merger is supposed to solve. Demand a system-wide mandate review, not a selective one that targets the smallest agencies working in the most politically contested spaces.

Engage civil society throughout the process, not just at its conclusion. The organisations working directly with these agencies on the ground can tell you what a disruption to the UNFPA’s supply chain means for a clinic in Uruguay, or what losing UN Women’s convening power means for a women’s rights organisation in Egypt. They are the most important voices, and they were absent.

Reform is legitimate and necessary. But reform built on flawed assumptions and the deliberate sidelining of those most affected is not reform; it’s regression dressed in the language of efficiency. States have both the authority and the responsibility to reject it.

CIVICUS interviews a wide range of civil society activists, experts and leaders to gather diverse perspectives on civil society action and current issues for publication on its CIVICUS Lens platform. The views expressed in interviews are the interviewees’ and do not necessarily reflect those of CIVICUS. Publication does not imply endorsement of interviewees or the organisations they represent.