United Nations Trust Fund to End Violence against Women
220 East 42nd Street, 21st Floor New York, NY 11226, USA
https://www.unwomen.org/en/trust-funds/un-trust-fund-to-end-violence-against-women
Background
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)
Areas of Focus
The UN Trust Fund’s priority areas of focus include:
- Improving access to essential specialist, safe and adequate services, including access to justice, for survivors for those at risk of violence.
- Transforming social norms, a key factor in preventing violence against women and girls.
- Ensuring more effective legislation, policies and national action plans that are shaped by women and girls in decision-making processes.
Resources
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
Women with mental disabilities held in Serbia’s institutions often suffer multiple forms of violence. A recent study by Mental Disability Rights Initiative-Serbia (MDRI-S) uncovered multiple forms of violence, including forced medical treatment such as the administration of contraceptives without informed consent, and forced abortions and sterilization.
The UN Trust Fund to End Violence against Women is supporting a project run by MDRI-S, a not-for-profit organization that advocates for the rights of women with mental disabilities, with a small grant. MDRI-S is the first organization in Serbia bringing the lives and narratives of women with mental disabilities living in custodial institutions to the attention of the public. MDRI-S advocates for the deinstitutionalization of people with mental disabilities and for the model of living in residential assisted living centers, while at the same time it invests in improving conditions of women still living in custodial institutions by sensitizing service providers to women’s needs.
MDRI-S has brought together numerous policy makers from government, parliament and independent bodies such as the Ombudsman and Commissioner for Equality, to present the findings of their research and recommendations for change. MDRI-S has so far trained 60 service providers on how to address violence against women with mental disabilities in custodial institutions. By involving policy makers and service providers, MDRI-S is ensuring that those working directly with women with mental disabilities are sensitized to have the information needed to prevent abuse from occurring, and encourages policy makers to become advocates and actors for deinstitutionalization.
The UN Trust Fund is committed to funding organizations that are operating at the grassroots level, focused on women’s rights, and are women-led. This includes building the capacity of grantee organizations to achieve results and sustain their impact even after the UN Trust Fund grant ends.
One measure of the UN Trust Fund’s success is the extent to which its grantees are successful in obtaining new and additional funding that ensures building the sustainability of the organisation and the work beyond the Trust Fund supported project. In an Annual Partner Survey of UN Trust Fund grantees, 46% of respondents reported success in obtaining funding to continue, replicate or scale up the project funded by the UN Trust Fund or to implement other EVAW related projects. More specifically, US$ 6,467,457 has been raised during 2017 to scale up, replicate or sustain the results of the UN Trust Fund projects and US$33,122,307 for other EVAW projects. 77% of respondents reported that the UN Trust Fund grant was instrumental in helping their organization mobilise additional funds. In the same survey - which attracted 139 respondents from 83 organisations - the majority were satisfied or very satisfied with their experience as a grantee (94%), especially with the capacity development training provided by the UN Trust Fund (91% reported that the training was very useful or useful).
A project implemented by Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) with funding from the UN Trust Fund in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Kenya is working to address gaps in the medical-legal process in order to improve responses to sexual violence against women and girls. The programme has been actively engaged in the two countries, both of which have endured widespread, conflict-related sexual violence and were being investigated for mass crimes by the International Criminal Court.
In December 2017, the Kavumu Case was concluded with the conviction of 11 men for crimes against humanity for the rape of 37 toddlers and young girls over a three-year period in the village of Kavumu, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. This was a landmark case because a sitting government official was stripped of his immunity and was found guilty for crimes that he and his armed militia committed and because it was the first time that survivors/witnesses were afforded innovative means of protection in court in the country. PHR helped to coordinate the investigation and provided technical assistance to clinicians and police investigators that led to the arrests of militia members.
The Azerbaijan Young Lawyers’ Union, supported by the UN Trust Fund, set up a pilot project to provide women with free legal, medical and psychological support services. The project also set up the only shelter for survivors of violence currently operating in the country. The project was in part a response to the 2015 Concluding Observations of the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women which called on Azerbaijan to ensure that women and girl victims of violence have access “to immediate means of redress and protection, including a sufficient number of adequate shelters in all regions”.
The project managed to provide protection and support to 448 women, almost twice the project target of 220 women. The project boosted the capacities of 10 staff members of the shelter through the series of the training sessions held by recognized international experts. The project also managed to sensitize 2,600 community members and 1,400 men and boys through information sessions on the causes and consequence of gender-based violence.
Analysis of the available data indicates an increase in knowledge and awareness of the concepts of gender, gender-based violence and available protection mechanisms among community members (87 per cent in community groups and 72 per cent in male groups).
The importance of up-scaling efforts to prevent violence against women is increasingly being acknowledged both by the international community and by civil society organizations. The SASA! methodology is a ground-breaking community mobilization approach developed by Raising Voices for the primary prevention of violence against women and HIV transmission. The methodology has been rigorously evaluated through a randomized controlled trial which demonstrated that SASA! is an effective approach, leading to a 52 per cent reduction in the risk of physical partner violence against women in communities where it was implemented. As a result, a wide range of actors, including NGOs, governments, UN agencies and faith-based groups are up-scaling implementation of this innovative and evidence-based approach. Currently, the SASA! methodology is being implemented in over 20 countries by more than 60 organizations. From 2010 to 2012, the UN Trust Fund supported Raising Voices’ first cohort of organizations across Eastern and Southern Africa to up-scale the SASA! methodology. Building on the learning from this previous grant as well as the increasing requests around the world to implement SASA!, this project works to meet the need for improved learning from, and guidance for, the wide range of organizations using and/or planning to use the SASA! methodology. Raising Voices collaborates with three partner organizations implementing SASA!—in rural Tanzania, in refugee camps in Kenya and in a community in Haiti—to improve guidance on how to adapt the methodology most effectively, maximizing the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of interventions. To date, two rounds of data collection have occurred in the research sites leading to key lessons about how to adapt the SASA! methodology in diverse settings. For example, in Kenya, SASA! is being adapted in the Dadaab Refugee Camp by the International Rescue Committee across their prevention work. Overall the methodology has been highly regarded by project staff and participants. The data collected to date shows that behaviours and attitudes are changing and community members are explicitly denouncing all forms of violence against women as unacceptable. Important lessons are also being learned though, on the importance of actively involving religious leaders and adapting the materials to suit the Somali culture prevalent in the camp. Tools will now be developed for use by other NGOs to help adapt the successful methodology to other contexts.
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.
“The training had a lot of impact on my life because I [now] have knowledge about the misdeeds of excision [cutting] and child marriage. I'm pregnant and if I have a girl I will not make her go through this practice”, said Fatoumata N.*, a peer educator in Mali. She was speaking about the harmful traditional practice of Female Genital Mutilation/Cutting (FGM/C), which is inflicted on 89 per cent of women and girls in Mali, according to the World Health Organization. FGM/C has devastating health ramifications for women and girls, including pain, bleeding, permanent disability and even death. This harmful traditional practice is not yet banned in Mali.
The UN Trust Fund is supporting the Malian organization AMSOPT to change social norms and provide access to medical and psychosocial services for survivors of FGM/C. The project’s awareness-raising efforts in the Kayes region, which has the highest rates of FGM/C in the country, have already led two villages to publicly renounce the harmful traditional practice as well as child marriage, and six others are in the process of doing the same. The two villages held public assemblies bringing together counselors, women, youth and village leaders to agree on the abandonment of FGM/C, and created a committee to ensure the application of the decision
*Name has been changed to protect the privacy of the individual.
In Egypt, a project by Al Shehab Institution for Comprehensive Development worked with women and girl survivors of violence, women domestic workers, female sex workers and women living with HIV in two marginalized communities in Cairo. By the end of June 2015, a new drop-in centre had been established providing legal and psychological services. Between April and June 2015, the programme touched the lives of some 111 women and girl survivors of violence and 231 female domestic workers, sex workers and women living with HIV/AIDS in the targeted communities.
A project funded by the UN Trust Fund and implemented by Plan Viet Nam is working to address gender-based violence in and around schools, one of the main barriers to girls’ empowerment and gender equality. A research-based model piloted in 20 schools across Hanoi reached approximately 30,000 adolescent girls and boys aged 11 to 18. Following the model’s success, the Hanoi Department of Education has undertaken to replicate the initiative across 766 schools in the city, potentially reaching more than 500,000 adolescents.