Thousands of international delegates are gathering in New York this week for the world’s largest meeting on women’s rights. The United Nation’s annual Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) is an opportunity for government ministers, UN officials, NGO representatives and activists to discuss the global state of gender equality and women’s empowerment. This year, there will be a strong focus on “ensuring and strengthening access to justice”.

But as senior UN figures urge countries to intensify their efforts to achieve gender equality, many of the delegates will be asking whether the UN is at risk of diluting its own commitment to women and girls.

The question centres on a plan to merge UN Women, the agency dedicated to gender equality and women’s empowerment, with the UN’s sexual and reproductive health agency, the UNFPA. The aim of the merger is to improve efficiency, strengthen impact, reduce duplication and create a single body for governments and partners to work with.

But since it was first proposed last year as part of UN80 – an initiative to reform the entire organisation – voices expressing concern over the idea have grown louder and more urgent.

Women’s rights groups and a significant number of member states fear that restructuring the two agencies at a time of multiple global crises, plummeting levels of aid and a fierce rollback of rights is a high-risk strategy.

‘Dangerous climate’

Jessica Stern, co-president of the Alliance for Diplomacy and Justice, which advocates for human rights in US foreign policy, said: “These two agencies have been working in a resource-depleted environment for a very long time; they are not perfect and not the only solutions to achieving gender equality and ensuring people have access to reproductive rights, but they are what we have now.

“And in the current climate,” she added, “when there is a violent and effective backlash, anything that destabilises the scant resources we have is dangerous.”

Critics of the plan argue that creating a single organisation would almost certainly reduce funding from donor countries, with severe and lasting consequences for the world’s most vulnerable women and girls.

Gita Sen, co-founder of the feminist network Dawn, said: “In today’s climate, if you tell a funder that you are merging they will think ‘so how much will I save?’, so the risk is you will end up with less money, and God knows the amount of money now is totally inadequate – it’s a drop in the ocean in terms of what’s needed.”

Stern added: “People around the world depend on UNFPA and UN Women programmes to counter sexual violence, domestic abuse, for accountability for marital rape and so-called ‘corrective rape’, for ‘honour’ killings. They depend on them for access to birth control and sex education. These agencies fight some of the most egregious forms of violence.”

On 26 January, Fòs Feminista, an international alliance campaigning for universal access to reproductive healthcare, called on member states to reject the merger, arguing that the proposal rests on faulty assumptions. In its report, it suggested that bigger savings could be made by merging other agencies.

“UNFPA (2024 budget: $1.45bn [£1bn]) and UN Women (2024 budget: $500m) demonstrate minimal overlap and low budgets, yet are targeted for consolidation, suggesting this proposal is driven by opposition to rights-based mandates rather than organisational efficiency,” read the report.

Fadekemi Akinfaderin, chief global advocacy officer at Fòs Feminista, expressed frustration that no alternatives to a merger appear to have been considered. “Wouldn’t you look at options and pros and cons? But [they seem to be] saying ‘this is it or nothing’. Why take a heavy handed approach to an organisation built on consensus?”

US threat

Both UN Women and UNFPA told the Guardian they fully supported UN80, but this was based on the assumption that their mandates – longstanding and globally agreed missions – will be preserved.

Women’s rights organisations, however, say that protecting those mandates in the current political climate is unrealistic. A merger would have to go to a vote, throwing open the opportunity for the US – which has already withdrawn financial support for UNFPA and UN Women – and other member states that are hostile to women’s rights to challenge the mandate of a new, single agency.

“My expectation, if this goes to a general assembly vote, is that the US will use its power to whip [other countries] to undermine and dismantle the architecture for gender equality and sexual and reproductive rights,” said Stern.

Under Donald Trump, the US has repeatedly rejected international efforts to advance gender equality, while advancing its own anti-rights agenda, through the anti-abortion Geneva Consensus declaration and an expanded “global gag rule”, for example. Such actions have been welcomed by ultra-conservative groups, such as the Centre for Family and Human Rights (C-Fam), one of the powerful anti-rights bodies that will be lobbying the UN at CSW this week.

In an email headlined “5,000 gender lunatics descending on the UN”, the C-Fam president, Austin Ruse, called on followers for donations to support their cause: “We are up against the full weight of the UN bureaucracy. We must ensure the document under negotiation does not contain language that threatens the family, the unborn child and our understanding of the human person.”

The language used by Ruse may be extreme but it is indicative of the virulent environment within which the UN is operating.

In Africa, the idea that human rights such as abortion are “ideological colonialism” imposed by progressives is widely promoted by groups such as C-Fam. In Latin America, these groups view ultra-conservative governments as allies – in recent years Peru, Argentina, El Salvador and Panama have either shut down or downgraded ministries and public bodies dedicated to women and gender.

“In this environment, [the proposed merger] feels like a tactical assault,” said Beth Schlachter, director of US external relations at MSI Reproductive Choices. “It could be a significant moment of pulling down what we gained.”

Fighting back

The threat to sexual and reproductive health programmes – one of the most politically contentious and aggressively attacked areas that the UN covers – has prompted an alliance of more than 500 rights organisations, including Fòs Feminista and MSI, as well as nearly 100 individuals, to sign an open letter to the UN secretary general, António Guterres, urging the UN to do all it can to safeguard them.

The letter said: “Experience shows that when SRHR [sexual and reproductive health rights] is absorbed into broader gender or development mandates without explicit articulation, it risks being deprioritized, underfunded, or rendered politically invisible.

“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,” the letter stated.

It is not just rights organisations expressing concern. At a recent UNFPA board meeting, member states including the UK, Sweden, Brazil and Germany urged the UN to protect SRHR.

The UN is working on an assessment of the benefits of the merger – yet to be published at the time of going to press. In the meantime, it maintains its promise to the women and girls of the world.

In a speech last month, UN Women’s executive director, Sima Bahous, assured member states: “In the headwinds of funding cuts, of backlash and more, our mandate … remains the single most comprehensive mandate in the United Nations system, to deliver on gender equality and women’s rights. It will always serve as the unshakeable ground on which we stand.”

But for thousands of women’s rights advocates heading to New York this week, and those delivering services around the world, that confidence seems misplaced. “The most charitable reading is that this [merger] proposal is naive,” said Stern.

It is uncertain whether or not the merger will go ahead but what is certain is that opinions about it are strong and women are determined to use CSW to make them heard.

Akinfaderin said: “It feels like, because the US has pulled the purse strings, the UN is willing to throw gender equality under the bus.”