Spotlight Inititative 

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 transforming the social norms, attitudes, and power relations that drive it. Spotlight Initiative implements evidence-based, whole-of-society prevention approaches that engage a range of stakeholders, including communities, schools, traditional and religious leaders, men and boys, to promote gender-equitable norms and behaviours.

In 2025, in Ecuador, the Initiative’s prevention campaigns promoting non-violent masculinities reached approximately 2 million people, contributing to increased public awareness of gender equality and GBV. In Uganda, nearly 27,000 community members were mobilized through the SASA! Together model, with reported shifts in community attitudes toward GBV. 

In Sierra Leone, the rollout of life skills curricula reached 72,000 learners nationwide, contributing to the integration of GBV prevention across the education sector. Through the Initiative's support, teachers were trained across 80 schools to deliver the Child and Adolescent Health and Life Skills (CAHLS) curriculum. Learners engaged with structured content on GBV prevention, sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR), and gender norms, strengthening their knowledge, skills and agency.

In Zambia, with the Initiative’s support, 400 trained teachers reached over 24,000 learners through the Connect with Respect methodology, while the Initiative engaged faith and traditional leaders in gender-transformative training, resulting in public commitments to eradicate GBV. At the global level, the Initiative’s #WithHer campaign generated approximately 28.7 million social media views and impressions, an 86 per cent increase from 2024, reaching mainstream audiences with behaviour change messaging on masculinity, image-based sexual violence, and gender equality.

Prevention programming that engages diverse actors across multiple levels of society, from communities and schools to digital platforms and global campaigns, generates the mutually reinforcing shifts in norms and behaviours that siloed, single-sector approaches cannot achieve. 

Robust legal and policy frameworks are foundational to advancing gender equality and eliminating violence against women and girls. When national legislation is aligned with international standards grounded in inclusive, consultative processes, and responsive to diverse communities, it strengthens protections against and response to violence against women and girls. Ensuring that laws and policies are implemented and upheld is critical to promoting tangible outcomes for women and girls.

In 2025, Spotlight Initiative programmes supported progress in advancing legal and policy reforms. In Sierra Leone, the programme supported the review of the Matrimonial Causes Act (1960) through a nationwide participatory process engaging over 700 participants, informing proposed amendments to strengthen protections against economic and psychological violence and reinforce women's rights to marital property, particularly for rural women. Another example, in Uganda, six districts enacted GBV and violence against children ordinances, embedding enforceable local-level protections across district governments.

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. 

Legislative reform is a critical pillar of efforts to end violence against women and girls, establishing enforceable protections, clarifying institutional responsibilities, and creating pathways to accountability for perpetrators. Spotlight Initiative works with governments, parliaments, civil society, and traditional institutions to support the development and strengthening of laws that protect women and girls.

In 2025, in Liberia, the Initiative provided technical and consultative groundwork that advanced the Women and Girls Protection Act of 2025, Liberia's most comprehensive legislative proposal to date addressing harmful practices. Inclusive engagements with lawmakers, traditional leaders, civil society, and communities helped build shared understanding and momentum for review and deliberation, reinforced by a national petition of more than 1,000 women and girls advocating for the bill's passage. In Zambia, the Initiative commenced the revision of the Gender Equity and Equality Act through close collaboration with the Gender Division, the Zambia Law Development Commission, and women's rights organizations, ensuring domestic law remains aligned with evolving international human rights standards. In Sierra Leone, a nationwide consultative process engaging over 700 participants informed the review of the Matrimonial Causes Act, laying the groundwork for stronger protections against economic and psychological violence and women's rights to marital property.

Strong legal frameworks, developed through inclusive processes and aligned with international standards, create the institutional foundation on which survivor protection and perpetrator accountability depend. 

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.

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.

Sustained, systemic change to end violence against women and girls requires governments, civil society, implementing partners, and UN Country Teams to have the knowledge, skills, and resources to prevent violence and respond effectively. Spotlight Initiative makes strategic investments in training and capacity development to strengthen institutional performance and deepen accountability across these sectors. As a cross-cutting enabler, capacity development underpins results across all of the Initiative's intervention areas; the examples below illustrate selected investments in 2025.

In 2025, across Spotlight Initiative programmes, more than 10,000 service providers spanning frontline health and psychosocial workers, justice personnel, law enforcement, and community actors were trained to deliver quality, survivor-centred services. Spotlight Initiative strengthened the capacity of more than 50 women's rights organizations and relevant civil society organizations to end violence against women and girls[1]. In Ecuador, this included capacity strengthening for Indigenous organizations through intercultural mediation and translation, reducing barriers to participation. In Zambia, women's rights organizations reported increased capacity to promote gender-responsive governance and support community members in reporting GBV cases. At the global level, Spotlight Initiative delivered inception training to UN colleagues in three Spotlight Initiative programme countries, strengthening the quality of comprehensive EVAWG programme delivery from the outset.

These investments strengthened the capacity of frontline institutions, civil society organizations, and UN Teams to prevent and respond to violence against women and girls in ways that are survivor-centred, coordinated, and increasingly embedded within national systems.

[1] As of 15 May 2026, the aggregated number of civil society organizations with strengthened capacity has been corrected from 46 to 53. This figure supersedes all previously reported results, and should be considered the official result.

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.

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.