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Launched in 2017 with an initial investment of over 500 million USD from the European Union, Spotlight Initiative is the United Nations Secretary-General’s High Impact Initiative to end violence against women and girls (EVAWG). Recognized as one of the 12 High-Impact Initiatives – driving progress across the sustainable development goals – Spotlight Initiative represents an unprecedented global effort to address violence against women and girls at scale.
During its first phase (2017- 2023), Spotlight Initiative helped cohere the UN system to implement 34 programmes across five regions. This included two civil society grant-making programmes – established in collaboration with the UN Trust to End Violence against Women and the Women’s Peace and Humanitarian Fund – which helped channel additional resources directly to civil society. By fostering a “One UN” approach under the leadership of the Resident Coordinators at the country level, Spotlight Initiative has leveraged various UN agencies’ complementary expertise, deepened collaboration, and streamlined operational processes, allowing for stronger programme delivery and better results for women and girls.
Through its deep partnerships at country and regional level – including with governments, civil society, faith-based and traditional leaders, academic institutions, media, the private sector, and others – Spotlight Initiative drove significant progress across response and prevention efforts. A strong commitment to meaningful engagement with civil society in particular, including local and grassroots organisations and feminist and women’s rights groups, has been central to the Initiative’s approach, as well. Under its first phase, nearly half of the Initiative’s activity funds were channeled directly to civil society, ensuring local ownership, buy-in, and sustainability of the Initiative's investments. At the global level, the Initiative forged a range of strategic partnerships, including with the Group of Friends, a coalition of 93 UN Member States advocating to end violence against women and girls, and the UN Foundation, which helped launch the WithHer Fund to channel more funding directly to local organizations.
Through its comprehensive approach – working to pass progressive laws and policies, strengthen institutions, deepen prevention programming, improve access to services, and generate data, and by centering partnerships – particularly with civil society – the Initiative has been shown to be 70% to 90% more effective at reducing the prevalence of violence against women and girls than siloed, single-pillar approaches. By aligning its interventions with national and local priorities, Spotlight Initiative works to deepen capacity, political will, and long-term commitment to ending violence against women and girls and advancing gender equality and women’s rights.
Unique to the Initiative is a whole-of-society approach that places ending violence against women and girls at the heart of national development priorities and gives local communities the tools they need to address violence in their specific context. The model works to support the development and revision of gender responsive laws and policies; strengthen institutions and data collection on VAWG; promote gender-equitable attitudes and positive social norms, and provide quality services for survivors of violence and their families. It does this work in partnerships with government and, critically, with civil society and women’s movements at every level, enhancing civic space and driving sustainable, transformative change.
United Nations Trust Fund to End Violence against Women
The United Nations Trust Fund in Support of Actions to Eliminate Violence against Women (UN Trust Fund) is the only global, multilateral, inter-agency grant-making mechanism exclusively focused on ending violence against women and girls. Established by General Assembly resolution 50/166 in 1996 and managed by UN-Women, the Fund provides vital resources to civil society and women's rights organizations to prevent violence against women and girls; improve access to adequate essential, multisectoral services for survivors; and support effective implementation of laws and policies.
Since its inception, the UN Trust Fund has invested over $240 million in 706 survivor-centered initiatives across 140 countries and territories, advancing Sustainable Development Goal 5 by translating global gender equality commitments into concrete action and bridging grassroots women's movements with international policy frameworks, as well as multiple other Sustainable Development Goals.
The UN Trust Fund recognizes that civil society organizations, particularly women-led and women’s rights organizations, drive the most effective and sustainable efforts to end violence against women and girls. Through dedicated flexible funding, it directly contributes to UN-Women's Strategic Plan 2022-2025, strengthening "Women's voice, leadership, and agency" (Outcome 5) and advancing "Ending violence against women and girls" (Impact 3).
By providing core support covering general operating costs, contingency planning, and staff wellbeing, the UN Trust Fund seeks to strengthen grantee partners’ organizational resilience, enabling organizations to withstand challenges, particularly in volatile environments. Its intentional intersectional approach prioritizes initiatives addressing multiple forms of discrimination, ensuring resources reach particularly marginalized women and girls. Strategically positioned within the UN ecosystem, it connects its partner organizations with UN entities, donors, and policymakers, nurturing innovation, elevating frontline voices, and catalyzing collaboration to strengthen collective knowledge and resources. Based on grantee partners’ experience addressing violence against women and girls, the UN Trust Fund also co-creates knowledge resources to inform more effective approaches across the field.
The Mid-Term Review of the 2021-2025 Strategic Plan (MTR),[1] published in 2024, reaffirmed that the UN Trust Fund has a unique role in providing long-term, flexible funding to grassroots and women’s rights organizations, in particular those operating in high-risk and crisis settings. It emphasized that the UN Trust Fund provides excellent value for money and lives up to its ambition of being more than a traditional donor. The MTR also found that stronger communication efforts were needed to mor effectively convey the UN Trust Fund’s distinctive and strategic role as well as to ensure the achievements of grantee partners were fully recognized and amplified.
[1] Mid-Term Review of the UN Trust Fund Strategic Plan 2021-2025 (UN Women, 2024)
UN Trust Fund website: http://untf.unwomen.org/en
UN Trust Fund Learning hub, including practice-based knowledge products, strategic assessments, and evaluations: https://untf.unwomen.org/en/learning-hub
UN Trust Fund publications: http://untf.unwomen.org/en/digital-library/publications
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The UN Trust Fund’s priority areas of focus include:
During the course of the Strategic Plan 2016-2020, the UN Trust Fund invested USD47 million in projects that solely or partly focused on preventing violence against women and girls.
To disseminate the expertise and knowledge of civil society and women's rights organizations, the UN Trust Fund worked with grantee organizations and researchers to create a series of briefings on preventing violence against women. The organizations' practice-based insights are invaluable to planning, designing and funding interventions aimed at ending violence against women and girls.
The United Nations Trust Fund in support of actions to eliminate violence against women (UN Trust Fund) is a global, multilateral grant-making mechanism that supports effort to prevent and end violence against women and girls. The UN Trust Fund, which was established in 1996 by the General Assembly in the resolution 50/166, is administered by the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women (UN-Women) on behalf of the United Nations system.
In Kosovo (under Security Council resolution 1244 (1999)), Medica Kosova is implementing a small grant from the UN Trust Fund to implement a project whose aim is to protect the legal rights, including property rights, of women who have experienced gender-based violence during and after the armed conflict, and to improve institutional responses to gender-based violence.