Friends and Colleagues, it has been a great privilege for me to be here today with all of you, listening, learning and celebrating. It is inspiring.

The Gender Seal programme exemplifies many of the ambitions of UNDP’s Global Policy Network: the Gender Seal has connected experts across offices and regions, supported countries through 25 technical advice missions -including peer-support between country offices- and nurturing exchanges through the Gender Seal Community with 200 practitioners involved.

The Gender Seal is also a platform that has helped us to innovate, experiment and learn. This past round, the Seal successfully carried out 14 virtual workshops, and 8 virtual missions on Spark Blue to assess the work of select country offices. They are not only creating new ways to conduct our global work, they are also helping us to lower UNDP’s carbon emissions.

The impact of the Gender Seal has also reached our partners. Today, the World Food Programme and the High Commissioner of Human Rights are implementing programmes inspired by your work and results. No less important, bilateral partners like the Directorate of International Cooperation from Iceland, are partnering with us to implement the Gender Seal.

We don’t settle, we want to evolve and grow. In 2021, as Achim said, the Gender Seal is expanding, and will provide tailored support to country offices in fragile contexts in partnership with Crisis Bureau; and as Mirjana said,  we will launch the Gender Seal Accelerated Gold Track in RBEC, to raise our ambition and respond to COVID crisis strongly.

In the spirit of the GPN, we will establish a new Gender Seal Hub in the Montenegro Country office to share expertise and learn with peer offices.  I would like to thank and congratulate Mirjana, the Istanbul Regional Hub and the Montenegro County office for taking this bold step and for pushing us to the next level.

For UNDP colleagues, we will be sending out a call for applicants soon for the next round of the Gender Seal.

I’m looking forward to seeing what else we can accomplish together.

Thank you !