Under-Secretary General Christian Saunders,
Assistant Secretary-General Nassif Palma,
Excellencies, dear colleagues and friends,
It is my pleasure to welcome you to WHO’s annual stakeholder conference for the prevention of, and response to, sexual misconduct.
It is heartening to see such an impressive attendance, which demonstrates our collective commitment to “zero tolerance” as not just a slogan, but a daily practice.
I see sexual misconduct as a betrayal of the people WHO exists to serve. It undermines our lifesaving and life-affirming work.
It’s completely unacceptable for WHO or our implementing partners to harm those we serve.
We have learned much in the past three years.
Your support, your experiences and your knowledge have been instrumental in the progress we have made.
I commend the leadership of the UN Secretary-General’s office, through the work of my friend, USG Christian Saunders and ASG Najla Palma.
Along with many cross-agency working groups and task teams, they have catalysed joint action across the entire UN system.
I thank you for not just your work, but for your willingness to collaborate and co-create.
Reflecting on the last three years, I see that the approach we took at WHO is beginning to have effect.
At the time, the media reported that a large number of cases of sexual exploitation and abuse were perpetrated by WHO personnel during the response to the 10th Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. That was a hard moment, and we took it seriously.
In fact, later, the Independent Commission that investigated the allegations identified 83 cases, and found that only 23 were related to WHO.
We then handed everything over to the UN Office of Internal Oversight Services, which found that nine of the 83 cases were related to the WHO workforce. But for us the numbers didn't matter. There were nine out of 83, but we said that one is too many.
But even before launching investigations, WHO started providing support to anyone who said they were victims of sexual exploitation and abuse during the 10Th Ebola outbreak, even when most of them were associated with personnel from other agencies.
Because we didn't want to say that only this many WHO and others are other agencies, and other agencies should take care of it. Because it is one UN family, and if you see from the perspective of the victims, they cannot say it was this agency or that agency, so we took in on ourselves and tried to help as much as we could.
As WHO we asked an independent commission to examine the claims. That was the first time to have an independent external panel, and that panel also hired an external investigator. We acted on all their recommendations, after the panel and the investigation was done, and handed over all case files to the UN investigation services for transparency and objectivity.
But we did more than manage the incidents. We launched an ambitious three-year strategy to institutionalize all prevention and response to sexual misconduct in our policies, procedures, practices and most importantly, in our culture.
Our strategy is not to do one thing but to implement a full set of interventions to assess and mitigate known risks;
Empower and continuously engage our workforce and build their capacity;
Create a speak-up culture;
And involve everyone in the change we want – that zero tolerance for sexual misconduct is the hallmark of WHO; an organization that is committed to do no harm, both in principle, and in practice.
We are now completing the second year of our three-year strategy on sexual misconduct.
We are progressing well, but we have a long way to go.
Culture change is led from the top, and must be supported by all personnel, especially leaders across the Organization. And it should have all the components: trainings, honest discussions, no elephant in the room, and above all, taking action. It is a combination of all of this that can bring us the desired change in mindset or culture.
Radical transparency builds trust within the organization and with our stakeholders.
While we have a long way to go, we see that change is beginning to be seen and felt.
We must sustain change across all our organizations, holding our institutions and our leadership accountable for both prevention and response.
I know this accountability starts with me for WHO.
The theme for this conference is thought partnership.
It acknowledges the need for us to reflect honestly about where we are, and where we've come from.
I would like to bring to your attention three things that I would like you to consider.
The first is the need for the whole UN system to pull together to provide coordinated and quality services to victims and survivors.
This year I asked USG Saunders and ASG Palma to develop a system where all agencies that form the UN Country Teams can share the responsibilities and costs of survivor care.
WHO is committed to paying our share and continuing to meet our obligations, but all agencies must join this effort under UN leadership and the Office of the Victims Rights advocate.
Second is the need to act in a more coordinated way during complex operations such as health and humanitarian emergencies.
We need to share risk management, jointly manage our implementing partners, and ensure all our personnel are screened, trained, capacitated and supervised.
When transgressions occur, we must feel confident that all our systems work with transparency, accountability and with no-impunity. This involves better coordination, sharing of information and sharing of resources.
This second recommendation is from our own experience. When the DRC incident happened, since all agencies were implicated, we asked all agencies to do it together. Sad to say, there was no interest. We were forced to stick out our neck. We knew the consequences: we would be criticized, we would be attacked. But we took the problem seriously, and we stuck our neck out, because we wanted change, even if it was alone. But doing it together would have been more impactful, to be honest. Doing it differently, and doing it together.
And I hope going forward we will commit to do this together, because in operations we work together, and we cannot isolate this, and say this agency or that agency. And from the 83 cases we have seen, it was distributed among all those who participated in the operation, and of course WHO had its share, the nine, as I said.
So I hope this will not be repeated, and we will face these challenges together, not one agency alone. Of course, we took all the punches, but I don't regret it. We did it deliberately. But I hope, going forward, if there is one message I would underline from this, it's that as one UN family, we have to work together. Because the communities we serve are the same. We cannot do it in silos. We have to do it together.
The third is the need to collaborate on generating and using data, research and evidence for what works and what does not.
Our aim should be prevention and since we work in the same countries, with the same risks, we have to find context-driven strategies that work to protect the people we serve and the people with whom we work.
This inevitably pushes us to bring new perspectives to the many challenges that we are working to solve, and to share ideas that can help us move forward.
That is why the sessions in this conference will be led not by WHO, but by many of you.
This will give us all an opportunity to take a step back, take off our agency hats, and think from the heart about the challenges we face and to how we can work together to address them.
Our main strategic priorities must be to prevent sexual misconduct happening in the first place;
To respond fast and fairly when it does happen;
To ensure due process for all involved;
And to create a culture of zero tolerance for sexual misconduct, inaction against it, and retaliation against those who report it.
As part of our contribution to system-wide reforms, WHO is making focused contributions on a number of key issues.
First, we’re creating a strong evidence base for the work we are doing, so we can track progress and make sure we are targeting the right areas.
This evidence base will be available to all our stakeholders.
Second, with World Vision International, WHO is co-leading a workstream mandated by USG Saunders to create a system-wide strategy for more effective and impactful training.
But as I said earlier, it's not just training alone. The first thing is candid discussions, no elephant in the room. And third is action. When you act, you can bring change. So when I said impactful training, it's not ignoring the rest of what we do for cultural change.
This includes leaders at country level, and focuses on behavioural and attitudinal change that is essential for achieving zero tolerance for sexual misconduct.
Third, WHO is encouraging host governments that we work with to engage more actively in preventing and responding to sexual misconduct by their personnel.
I will present WHO’s proposal on Member State accountability to our Executive Board in early 2025.
I understand this subject will also be discussed in the conference tomorrow.
Let me close by thanking all of you participating today, including those from UN agencies, civil society, academia, and WHO Member States.
We are more than the sum of our parts and our collective energy is the fuel to bring about change. Before I close, there was one that I was so proud to do immediately after we started this movement, and that's appointing the wonderful Gaya.
I would like to thank Gaya and her team for all of the hard work. I know that many of you have told me, “You have a wonderful team". I'm lucky to have that. And I'd like to express my gratitude to the team for all of the hard work and the many things they have done. But as I said, we're only beginning, there's still a lot to do, and I have confidence in Gaya and her team that we will make significant progress in the coming few years.
I look forward to hearing about your deliberations and your ideas for how we can accelerate progress, while keeping victims and survivors at the heart of what we do.
I thank you.