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During 2019, the UN Trust Fund to End Violence against Women commissioned an independent meta-evaluation and a meta-analysis to provide insights into what makes Trust Fund supported projects effective as well as into the strengths and weaknesses in evaluation practices. This work also established a database that will enable the Trust Fund to analyse future evaluations of its funded projects and advance the standards and rigour of its overall evaluation practice. Overall, the evaluators found an upward trend in the quality of the evaluations. The meta-evaluation was concluded with a number of recommendations to improve the quality and usefulness of evaluations, which included reviewing the questions to assist evaluators in writing more nuanced findings, greater disaggregation of data and ensuring that recommendations create a pathway for identifying recommendations that are clear, realistic, actionable and timebound.
In Solomon Islands, the Regional Rights Resource Team of the Pacific Community, funded by the UN Trust Fund, is implementing a pilot project aimed at improving access to justice for women survivors of violence in the provinces of Guadalcanal and Malaita. The aim of the project is to assist the authorities of Solomon Islands in the implementation of the 2014 Family Protection Act. The Act provides for an integrated response by various government departments, for assistance to survivors of family and domestic violence, for improved access to justice and for redress for survivors of violence against women. The grantee has developed a national training curriculum and accreditation scheme to develop the capacity of selected informal justice mechanisms established in rural communities under the Family Protection Act to deliver quality services. Five capacity-building and monitoring missions at each of the 37 project sites have resulted in an increase in the number of cases reported and in discussions about domestic violence as a harmful practice. A total of 48 authorized justices have been trained. They continue to show a willingness to hold awareness-raising sessions and speak to their communities about their role and about the purpose of the Family Protection Act.
The United Nations Trust Fund to End Violence against Women is the only global grant-making mechanism exclusively dedicated to eradicating all forms of violence against women and girls. The UN Trust Fund is managed by UN Women on behalf of the UN system and involves 24 UN organs and bodies in its decision-making processes through Regional and Global Programme Advisory Committees (PACs). With the strong institutional support of UN-Women and its regional, multi-country and country offices and working closely with the rest of the United Nations system through its inter-agency Programme Advisory Committee, the UN Trust Fund plays a vital role in driving forward collective efforts to prevent and eliminate violence against women and girls.
In October 2018, the founder of the Panzi Hospital in Bukavu, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Denis Mukwege, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace for his work with women and girls who are survivors of sexual violence. The hospital helped to pioneer the Panzi Foundation model of integrated rights-based psychosocial, legal and socioeconomic support provision in one-stop centres. The Panzi Foundation, which was awarded a grant from the UN Trust Fund to enhance its services for sexual violence survivors, worked in partnership with Physicians for Human Rights, another Trust Fund grantee, to train medical, legal and psychosocial professionals on the principles underlying its model and on the collection of forensic evidence to bring the perpetrators of sexual violence to justice and obtain justice for survivors. Beginning in 2011, the Trust Fund has invested in the Programme on Sexual Violence in Conflict Zones launched by Physicians for Human Rights and is currently funding its second generation of results. Since that time, Physicians for Human Rights has trained 1,578 health-care, legal and law enforcement professionals, who have provided services to 42,162 survivors of sexual violence throughout the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Kenya.
The UN Trust Fund cooperates closely with 24 UN organs and bodies through Regional and Global Programme Advisory Committees.
During the implementation and monitoring stage, the UN Trust Fund provides training to UN Women field colleagues on the reporting requirements for the grantees, as well as on EVAW programmatic and technical aspects of the grantees’ project implementation.
In 2018, the UN Trust Fund published a technical annex to its Annual Report of 2017, providing an update on the results framework of its strategic plan, 2015–2020. As the first such report to be produced by the UN Trust Fund in its 20-year history, it involved the development of indicators, methods and systems to collect data, including input from, and in consultation with, more than 70 grantee organizations. As a result, the framework has been simplified to include three tiers of result types in order to better reflect which results can be attributed to the secretariat of the UN Trust Fund and which are achieved by the organizations themselves through the Trust Fund grant. A mid-term review of the current Trust Fund’s strategic plan was initiated in 2018, and the report is scheduled to be issued in early 2019.
The UN Trust Fund as a UN system wide grant giving mechanism, specialized in ending violence against women, coordinates and collects inputs from 21 UN agencies present at the Program Advisory Committee of the UN Trust Fund’s governance body throughout the grants selection stage.
During the implementation and monitoring stage, the UN Trust Fund provides training to UN Women field colleagues on the reporting requirements for the grantees, as well as on EVAW programmatic and technical aspects of the grantees’ project implementation.