Measures

Reliable, disaggregated data on violence against women and girls is essential to tracking progress, identifying gaps, and ensuring that policies and programmes are grounded in evidence. Spotlight Initiative invests in strengthening national data systems, results measurement frameworks, and the global evidence base on what works to end violence against women and girls.

In 2025, across the Initiative's programmes, more than 800 service providers, government officials, and civil society staff were trained to collect, manage, analyse, and report administrative data on violence against women and girls and harmful practices. Four countries, Ecuador, Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Uganda,[1] made progress toward establishing national, multisectoral administrative data systems. In Ecuador, the Unified Violence Registry was expanded to incorporate four new institutions, strengthening the ability of multiple entities to track, monitor, and coordinate responses to violence against women and girls. In Sierra Leone, the government-led rollout of GBVIMS+ dismantled data silos across police, ministries, and NGOs, enabling a unified dashboard tracking survivor pathways and strengthening cross-ministry referral linkages. In Uganda, over 700 district personnel were trained in GBV data management, strengthening harmonization and reporting quality across 12 districts, including aligning GBV data with refugee protection systems to better capture marginalized populations.

Strong data systems and rigorous measurement frameworks are foundational to the credibility, accountability, and learning that sustained efforts to end violence against women and girls require.

[1] As of 15 May 2026, the aggregated number of countries that made progress on administrative data systems was corrected from three to four. This figure supersedes all previously reported results and should be considered the official result.

In 2025, UN Women continued shaping global normative frameworks on EVAWG through sustained engagement in intergovernmental processes and policy platforms. Support to United Nations General Assembly and Human Rights Council processes, alongside engagement with the EDVAW Platform and its members from independent global and regional mechanisms, strengthened international standards, including emerging issues such as technology-facilitated violence against women and girls.

These efforts contributed to concrete normative advances, including 205 Member State commitments under the Beijing+30 Action Agenda, of which a third were made under the Zero Violence Agenda, and strengthened integration of gender equality considerations in 45% of General Assembly and 82% of Human Rights Council resolutions. UN Women also contributed to the adoption of the African Union Convention on the Elimination of Violence Against Women and Girls, reinforcing global and regional legal frameworks.

Partnerships with regional bodies, justice networks and civil society further supported the development of investigative standards and strengthened implementation of human rights frameworks addressing violence against women. Through the EU-funded ACT programme, 179 women’s rights organizations helped shape the outcomes of 20 global and regional normative and policy processes on ending violence against women and girls, strengthening accountability and service delivery through amplified feminist advocacy.

Overall, these efforts reinforced international norms and standards, ensured continued global commitment to advancing EVAWG agendas, and strengthened the coherence and responsiveness of policy frameworks to emerging and evolving forms of violence, including through an analytical review of latest global and regional normative developments on technology-facilitated violence against women and girls. 

Femicide represents the most extreme manifestation of gender-based violence and requires dedicated legal, institutional, data, and prevention responses. Spotlight Initiative addresses femicide through integrated approaches spanning legal reform, data generation, survivor services, and social norm change, with particular depth in Latin America where prevalence and institutional attention to the issue are both high.

In 2025, in Ecuador, 41 justice sector officials were trained under the National Protocol for the Investigation of Femicides and 15 agents were trained as institutional trainers to cascade these competencies across the justice sector. The femicide alert system was expanded to two additional provinces, increasing geographic coverage of early warning mechanisms. Pioneering tools for gender-sensitive disciplinary investigations within the police helped improve how violence against female police officers was handled, with a draft Ministerial Agreement prepared to support mandatory institutionalization of these standards.

Spotlight Initiative's comprehensive model ensures that efforts to eliminate femicide are reinforced across legal, institutional, and preventive dimensions, driving sustained progress toward accountability and justice for survivors and their families.

Access to coordinated, survivor-centred services across health, justice, psychosocial, and legal sectors is essential to ensuring that women and girls who experience violence receive the support they need and that perpetrators are held accountable. Spotlight Initiative works to strengthen multi-sectoral response systems and the capacity of frontline institutions to deliver quality, integrated care.

In 2025, over 1.5 million people accessed gender-based violence services across Spotlight Initiative programmes. In Uganda, Spotlight Initiative-supported innovations – including mobile legal clinics, paralegal networks, and community-based case management mechanisms — strengthened survivors’ access to justice and accountability for sexual and gender-based violence. These efforts contributed to convictions in dozens of SGBV cases heard at Special High Court sessions, with over 400 survivors securing restitution and the recovery of property. In Ecuador, police officers were trained under the National Protocol on Urgent Protection Measures, strengthening institutional capacity to issue and enforce protective orders for survivors at risk.

Fragmented service delivery remains one of the most significant barriers to effective response; integrated, well-resourced systems are essential to ensuring survivors receive consistent, rights-based support regardless of where they enter the system.

Ending violence against women and girls requires a joined up UN system that is equipped to design and deliver comprehensive, rights-based, and evidence-informed programming. To support this, Spotlight Initiative continued investing in strengthening the technical capacities of UN Country and Regional Teams interested in developing Spotlight Initiative programmes. Technical webinars on the Spotlight Initiative model and comprehensive EVAWG programming reached 190 UN personnel across 19 UN Country and Regional Teams, supporting the development of high-quality concept notes for new evidence-based programmes.

At the same time, the Initiative continued supporting existing Spotlight Initiative programmes through the provision of high-quality technical advice and operational guidance. In 2025, the Initiative revised and updated its core technical guidance and key frameworks – including the Initiative’s common results framework – for strengthened programming for women and girls. The Initiative also translated key technical materials into four languages, and disseminated these across programmes and partners. Spotlight Initiative’s participatory monitoring, evaluation, and reporting content was also integrated into a UN System Staff College system-wide course, strengthening the capacity of UN practitioners to apply rights-based monitoring approaches across EVAWG programming and more broadly within the UN Sustainable Development Cooperation Framework. 

Taken together, these investments in UN System capacity strengthen the quality, coherence, and sustainability of collective action to end violence against women and girls across diverse contexts.

In 2025, UN Women significantly expanded evidence-based prevention and advocacy to address the root causes of violence against women and girls. Building on the RESPECT framework, prevention efforts were scaled and adapted across regions, including Latin America and the Caribbean, and reinforced through the rollout of an updated RESPECT 2.0 framework, integrating new evidence, humanitarian applications and intersectional risk mitigation approaches. 

UN Women supported 93 countries to develop or implement prevention strategies and action plans, alongside the development of a dedicated global prevention strategy positioning prevention as a central pillar across normative, coordination and operational work. 

Capacity-building efforts included a regional Training of Trainers in West and Central Africa, equipping stakeholders from 15 countries (with reach across 24 countries) to implement evidence-based prevention programming. The RESPECT Framework was localized and adapted to Latin America and the Caribbean, integrating concrete policy examples from the region and building capacities of government authorities, public servants, and civil society to implement the evidence‑based interventions promoted by the framework in Bolivia, Chile, and Ecuador. 

Community-based programming, youth engagement, and partnerships with civil society, faith actors and local institutions contributed to shifts in harmful social norms, including through 76 initiatives across 39 countries globally. Concrete country-level results included:

• In Malawi, 1,893 child marriages were dissolved, enabling girls’ return to school
• In Pakistan, over 80 stakeholders across six provinces contributed to the development of a National Prevention Action Plan

UN Women also strengthened its global convening and advocacy role, including through implementation of the EU-funded ACT programme supporting feminist movements and countering backlash. High-level advocacy engagements, including global events with over 150 participants, advanced commitments to safe work environments and accelerated ratification of ILO Convention 190.

Innovative approaches—including engagement with men and boys, private sector partnerships and storytelling initiatives—further reinforced prevention as a central pillar linking policy, community engagement and behavior change.

Overall, these efforts strengthened prevention ecosystems by connecting policy frameworks, evidence generation, community mobilization and global advocacy to drive sustainable change.

In 2025, UN Women supported Member States in strengthening multisectoral national policies and action plans on EVAWG, ensuring they were evidence-based, costed and aligned with international standards. Across regions, countries advanced gender-responsive governance frameworks that integrated EVAWG into national planning processes and strengthened institutional coordination mechanisms.

UN Women’s support translated into the adoption of 98 EVAWG policies and action plans across 41 countries, with an additional 93 countries advancing prevention strategies and 59 countries strengthening survivor-centred service systems.

These efforts translated into tangible results, including 2 billion women and girls living in countries taking new steps to prevent violence, and 43 countries improving service delivery systems for survivors.

Policy innovation also linked EVAWG to broader development agendas, including social norms change, care systems, economic empowerment and political participation, contributing to more integrated, comprehensive and sustainable national responses.

This scale of policy support reflects UN Women’s sustained contribution to institutionalizing prevention and response frameworks, strengthening enabling environments and advancing coordinated national action to end violence against women and girls.

Spotlight Initiative operationalizes a "One UN" approach under the leadership of Resident Coordinators at country level, coordinating 13 UN agencies across the Initiative to deliver coherent, multi-sectoral responses to ending violence against women and girls. This model of UN inter-agency collaboration is central to how the Initiative drives efficiency, reduces duplication, and strengthens collective accountability.

In 2025, regular inter-agency engagement was maintained through quarterly Director-level meetings and monthly technical-level meetings with UN Agency Focal Points, enabling joint planning and harmonized approaches to programme design, implementation, and reporting. At the programme level, RC-led coordination produced concrete results: in Liberia, harmonized planning and joint technical reviews strengthened inter-agency accountability and reduced duplication  across agency efforts , while in Zambia, unified UN leadership under the Resident Coordinator deepened mutual accountability and donor engagement for programme delivery. In Sierra Leone and Ecuador, cost-sharing arrangements, joint procurement and shared operational tools improved inter-agency coherence and reduced administrative delays. At the global level, Spotlight Initiative and the UN Trust Fund to End Violence against Women jointly led the development of a draft UN-wide funding framework to support more predictable financing for civil society organizations working to end violence against women and girls. This will be launched in mid-2026. Additionally, in 2025, Spotlight Initiative convened stakeholders from across UN agencies to deliver public webinars on ending GBV, to act as reference group members in various technical and research processes, and to participate at global events and convenings.

Sustained inter-agency coordination strengthens the coherence, efficiency, and collective accountability of UN action to end violence against women and girls, ensuring the system's diverse expertise is mobilized in service of shared results.

In 2025, UN Women strengthened UN system-wide coordination on EVAWG through its leadership of inter-agency mechanisms and global partnerships. As Secretariat of the UN Inter-agency Working Group on EVAWG, it sustained collaboration across UN entities to advance coherent policy and programmatic approaches, including through engagement in UN Action to promote survivor-centred responses and address emerging risks such as technology-facilitated and conflict-related sexual violence. 

Whole-of-system efforts to EVAWG were captured through the update of the UN Inventory of Activities to EVAWG and analyzed through joint assessment with the Spotlight initiative which resulted in the first brief on progress to EVAWG by the UN System.

Coordination efforts contributed to results across 135 countries supported under the Strategic Plan, alongside strengthened UN system accountability reflected in a 105% increase in UNCT-SWAP reporting (125 countries). UN Women also played a leading role in global partnerships, including co-leadership of the Generation Equality Action Coalition on Gender-Based Violence and engagement in the Global Partnership for Action on Online Gender-Based Harassment and Abuse.

At regional and country levels, UN Women supported the operationalization of inter-agency coordination platforms, including task forces and structures, aligning prevention, response and advocacy efforts. Joint programmes and partnerships demonstrated continued multi-agency delivery, including follow-up to the Spotlight Initiative and migration-focused initiatives. 

UN Women continued to coordinate the Secretary-General campaign UNiTE to end violence against women on behalf of the UN System. In 2025, the Campaign delivered its largest global activation during the 16 Days of Activism, focusing on digital violence through the #NoExcuse for Online Abuse theme. Marking Beijing+30, it positioned online abuse as a systemic human rights issue requiring prevention, accountability and survivor-centred responses. The campaign achieved exceptional reach, with web audiences growing sixfold to 3.5 million users, 424 million media reach, and 7.9 million social media impression

Through coordinated programming, the EU-funded ACT programme strengthened 757 women’s rights organizations and supported 179 organizations to influence 20 global and regional policy processes, including CSW69, the Beijing+30 Action Agenda and HLPF outcomes. Coordination was further reinforced through Spotlight Initiative Phase 2, where UN Women co-chaired the global Advisory Body and supported implementation of USD 19.3 million (25% of total programme funding) across multiple country and regional programmes.

These efforts strengthened system-wide coherence, accountability and collective impact in advancing EVAWG commitments across the UN system.

Technology-facilitated gender-based violence is a rapidly growing form of abuse that disproportionately affects women and girls, including human rights defenders, journalists, and politicians, and increasingly intersects with offline harm. Spotlight Initiative engages with this issue through knowledge-sharing, capacity building, and support to country-level programming responses. 

In 2025, the Initiative supported UNFPA-led global work on TF GBV through participation in the UNFPA TF GBV Advisory Board and the Third Global Symposium on TF GBV in March 2025, where findings informed updates to the Initiative’s guidance on best practices in addressing TF GBV. In Zambia, Spotlight Initiative and UNFPA co-hosted a public webinar reaching over 100 participants, including government and civil society representatives, designed for accessibility through sign Zambian sign language interpretation and an in-person viewing session, developed in direct response to anticipated risks of increased TF GBV during national elections. In Liberia, the #SafeDigitalLiberia campaign engaged 17 digital influencers during the 16 Days of Activism, reaching over 155,500 followers with messaging on digital safety and women’s rights. 

Engagement with TF GBV reflects the Initiative’s commitment to ensuring that its comprehensive model remains responsive to emerging and evolving forms of violence, particularly as digital spaces become increasingly central to how violence is perpetrated and experienced.