The birth of UN Women marks a historic moment. This is an unprecedented opportunity to accelerate progress towards the goals of gender equality and women’s empowerment and bring about far-reaching changes for the world’s women and girls. But success is only possible if we build a powerful and effective agency that has the autonomy, status, expertise, operational capacity and budget to deliver real and lasting impact. This paper outlines concrete recommendations for shaping an agency able to deliver real results for women and girls in 4 areas: global autonomy and decision-making, operational capacity and accountability, civil society participation and funding.