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UNFPA provides support, in terms of funding, knowledge management and capacity development to 98 countries, as they implement the Essential Services Package for women and girls subject to violence. In 2021, UNFPA in partnership with other UN agencies published a seventh module of ESP which provides guidance on estimating resource requirements for a minimum package of services.
UNFPA works to make gender-based violence prevention and response services available to marginalized groups, such as refugees, people with disabilities, displaced populations, and indigenous people across 97 countries. As an example of UNFPA's intersectional approach to GBV, the We Decide Programme addresses GBV against women and young persons with disabilities, through strengthened prevention and response including accessible GBV services. The programme also supports women and young persons with disabilities to access SRH services, exercise their reproductive rights, and be empowered to make their own decisions free from discrimination and violence.
Due to its wide network of Offices, UNFPA is present before, during and after disasters. 1.2 million people reached with services related to gender-based violence (prevention, risk mitigation and response) in 46 countries.
UNFPA Regional and Country Offices in 113 settings work to integrate GBV and SRHR services. For example, UNFPA provided integrated, quality services for gender-based violence and sexual and reproductive health to 18,460 survivors in eight African countries.
In 2020, 76, 651 girls and women survivors or at risk of FGM received services in health care, social welfare, and access to justice.
UNFPA supports the global geospatial knowledge platform to assist in knowledge sharing related to the prevalence of intimate partner violence for 119 countries and their subregions. A geospatial dashboard on IPV was launched in December 2020, and an accompanying report on IPV data was published in May 2021.
During emergencies, UNFPA is a lead agency in enabling safe and ethical service data collection and management, including coordinating the GBV Information Management System (GBVIMS) Steering Committee (UNFPA, UNICEF, UNHCR, IRC and IMC). Online (Primero/GBVIMS+) and offline (GBVIMS) GBV case management and incident monitoring systems facilitate safe and ethical GBV data collection and sharing in order to support a continuous process of evaluation in the improvement and coordination of services to ensure that survivor-centered care is supported, and support quality service provision by providing a set of tools which help service providers to support survivors in an integrated manner. GBVIMS and GBVIMS+ are currently used by 159 non-governmental organisations (139 national and 20 international) and engage 12 UN entities in 25 countries.
At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, UNFPA was at the forefront in projecting the impact of women and girls. In April 2020, UNFPA, Avenir Health and Johns Hopkins University published modelled data on the impact of the pandemic on gender-based violence, female genital mutilation and child marriage. This model has been highly cited to exemplify the devastating effects of the pandemic on efforts to end VAW. UNFPA estimated that if the lockdown continued for 6 months, 31 million additional gender-based violence cases could be expected, and for every 3 months of continued lockdown, an additional 15 million additional cases of gender-based violence were to be expected. It was also estimated that 2 million cases of FGM and 13 million cases of child marriage that could have been otherwise prevented, would occur as a consequence of the pandemic.
UNFPA is undergoing a costing exercise for GBV programs at country level. By August 2021, the cost of UNFPA’s GBV prevention and response programmes had been estimated for 9 countries.
As of 2021, 15 GBV prevalence surveys and 24 countries have benefited from the kNOwVAW data capacity building initiative. This initiative also supported 9 countries in the Asia Pacific to publish reports with findings of a VAW prevalence survey.
In November 2020, the East Asia and Pacific Regional Offices of UNFPA, UN Women and UNICEF launched a joint study exploring and illustrating the interlinkages between violence against women and violence against children in four countries, namely Cambodia, Papua New Guinea, the Philippines and Viet Nam.