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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 Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East
Internally, UNRWA is guided by its Gender Policy (2007), Medium-Term Strategy (2016-2021), and Gender Equality Strategy (2016-2021): 'Integrating Gender, Improving Services, Impacting Lives.' Further, UNRWA is guided by all relevant commitments by the UN system, including but not limited to: The Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW); The Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action; The United Nations Secretary-General’s campaign UNiTE to End Violence against Women (UNiTE Campaign); and Sustainable Development Goal.
The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) was established pursuant to General Assembly resolution 302 (IV) of December 1949. The Agency is a subsidiary body of the Assembly and became operational on 1 May 1950, responding to the needs of about 750,000 Palestine refugees. It is one of the largest United Nations programmes, with a population of approximately 5 million registered Palestine refugees under its mandate and over 30,000 staff.
- UNRWA Gender Policy (2007)
- UNRWA Experience in GBV Programming: Lessons from the first five years (2015)- What’s at Stake Fact sheet (2018)
- UNRWA Gender Equality Strategy (2016-2021): Integrating Gender, Improving Services, Impacting Lives (2016)
- UNRWA GBV Prevention Framework (2017)
- UNRWA Guidelines for GBV risk-mitigation in emergencies (2017)
Sheikh Jarrah, East Jerusalem. Palestinian Territory
As part of the Agency's commitment to gender equality, UNRWA prioritizes targeted interventions based on identified field priorities, one of which is gender-based violence (GBV). Thus, in view of addressing GBV holistically, UNRWA adopted in 2009 a multisectoral approach, which was informed by the Inter-Agency Standing Committee (IASC) Guidelines for GBV in Humanitarian Settings. One of the core aspects of the multisectoral approach is the centrality of survivours’ rights and needs, such as ensuring access to adequate services, confidentiality and safety. UNRWA's approach to addressing GBV focused on four main areas: i) training UNRWA staff to identify, refer and provide support to GBV survivors; ii) developing referral pathways; iii) building partnerships with external service providers; and iv) raising awareness and involving Palestine Refugee communities in the protection from GBV, to enhance both response and prevention.
In 2014, UNRWA began working on addressing GBV in emergencies, based on increasing concerns on responding and mitigating GBV in the context of the conflicts in Syria and in Gaza. Building on this, a process for increasing the institutional capacity of the Agency to address GBV in emergency contexts started in 2015 through a multi-year programme entitled 'Building Safety', which included the development of the following key components: i) Guidelines for GBV Risk Mitigation in Emergencies (2017); ii) GBV Training Package (2018); iii) E-learning Course on GBV Risk Mitigation in Emergencies (2018); iv) GBV Prevention Framework (2017). Integral to the work on GBV in emergencies, UNRWA has also been working on enhancing community participation and engagement.
In 2016, UNRWA worked on the development of a common monitoring framework which aims at systemizing data collection among field offices, and ensuring that data informs programming. UNRWA thus follows up on key indicators related to the number of survivours identified, services accessed, trainings to staff, changes in staff capacity to address GBV, as well as other prevention related indicators.
In 2016, UNRWA has worked on the development of a GBV prevention framework which consists of two parts: the first provides a series of processes that need to be put in place to strengthen GBV prevention from an organisational perspective; the second part includes an outline of the key components/ steps in designing successful GBV prevention activities.
UNRWA developed and finalized the new Gender Equality Strategy (2016-2021), 'Integrating Gender, Improving Services, Impacting Lives.' The new strategy consolidates gender mainstreaming in the Agency’s organizational processes and programmes and aims at improving service delivery and reducing vulnerabilities among Palestine refugee women, men, boys, and girls. In this light, it serves to guide and frame all gender-related work by the Agency, including work on GBV.
Referral systems in place in each of the five fields allow the Agency to collect non-identifiable data on GBV trends, including perpetrators, types of violence and services needed and accessed. Data collected allows the Agency to monitor progress and measure impact of the various interventions as well as informs the planning and implementation of future activities by building on lessons learnt, best practices and bringing together different experiences from all the fields of operation.
UNRWA provides protection, support, and services (education, health, relief and social services) through established referral systems in all five fields of operations, in more than 150 locations (which include camps, health centres, and schools). Referral systems created pathways between the different UNRWA programmes internally, as well as externally involving other service providers to ensure holistic support to survivors. Through these internal and external pathways, UNRWA is able to provide psychosocial counselling, legal services, and medical services among other.
UNRWA, working with local NGOs and community-based structures and organizations, in addition to UN agencies at the field level, engages men, women, as well as youth and children in the awareness-raising activities through discussion groups and support groups. UNRWA employs art, theatre and photography as a way of reaching out to the community and creating space for self-expression and support through different activities.
UNRWA has developed context-specific GBV prevention initiatives in all its five fields of operation (Gaza, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and the West Bank), building on local partnerships and working with community structures. These initiatives have focused on developing effective approaches to tackle root causes of GBV, addressing power imbalances and gender inequality and engaging communities in the effort to combat GBV.
Capacity-building of UNRWA staff, including trainings, has been a focus for UNRWA in ensuring that addressing Gender Based Violence is embedded into the work done by the different Agency’s programmes. To that effect, UNRWA has started training staff on identifying and addressing GBV through different levels of trainings. Trainings have served a dual purpose to not only in increasing staff capacity to respond to GBV, but also raise awareness and change perceptions of UNRWA staff. To support the training of staff, UNRWA developed a GBV manual which was developed in 2012.