Ghana has reiterated the need to operationalize the United Nations Security Council’s (UNSC) agenda on youth and women, making them essential pillars of the UN’s support for resilience-building towards defeating terrorism and violent extremism.
Madam Shirley Ayorkor Botchwey, the Minister of Foreign Affairs and Regional Integration, said women and the youth faced peculiar challenges in their communities as they were disproportionately impacted by conflict and violence.
The Minister said this when she chaired the UNSC Ministerial open debate on the topic: “Integrating Effective Resilience-Building in Peace Operations for Sustainable Peace”.
Ghana currently chairs the rotating Presidency of the Council for the month of November.
According to UNICEF, three out of 10 young people, many of them girls, are out of school in conflict-affected countries.
“It is important for this Council to encourage coherent action across the United Nations System targeted at the resilience-building agenda for sustainable peace.”
While the different organs of the UN had separate responsibilities that impacted the peace-development nexus, “in practice, the sum of our efforts does not add up to conditions in which peace thrives,” Madam Botchwey said.
The collective contribution of the System had to be integral to the way mandates were adopted and executed.
Madam Botchwey said it was important to reconfigure the UN Peace Operations to ensure a situationally determined balance between kinetic actions aimed at restoring peace.
This could be done through defeating terrorism and through non-kinetic measures to address the underlying causes of conflict.
“We hope that this debate will lead to a process that transforms the peace operation model to respond to the conditions of today.”
She said the Council had to rise to its mandate and deal with the critical recommendation from the HiPPO Report on the need for new modalities to deal with terrorism and violent extremism, the emerging threats to peace and security in the world.
“Threats to international peace and security continue to multiply every day, every day that no action was taken”.