United Nations Trust Fund to End Violence against Women
The UN Trust Fund cooperates closely with 24 UN organs and bodies through Regional and Global Programme Advisory Committees.
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 United Nations Trust Fund in support of actions to eliminate violence against women is a global, multilateral grant-making mechanism that supports efforts to prevent and end violence against women and girls. The Trust Fund, which was established in 1996 by the General Assembly in its resolution 50/166, is administered by the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women (UN-Women) on behalf of the United Nations system. With the strong institutional support of UN Women and its regional, multi-country and country offices, and working closely with the rest of the United Nations system through its inter-agency Programme Advisory Committee, the Trust Fund plays a vital role in driving forward collective efforts to prevent and eliminate violence against women and girls.
In Peru, the organization Red Nacional de Promoción de la Mujer is implementing a project in the regions of Ayacucho and Huánuco aimed at reducing gender-based violence against older women who were victims of conflict-related violence in the 1980s and 1990s. The project has empowered more than 487 women, of whom 44 per cent were over 60 years of age, by increasing their awareness of their rights. Through peer-to-peer exchange workshops, the grantee reached more than 210 older women from various organizations and 286 men and other women, including students and youth groups. The grantee adopted a holistic approach to developing participatory needs assessments, awareness-raising and training workshops and communications campaigns, all focusing on rights, interculturality, gender and aging. The project was also aimed at raising awareness among local officials and advocating for gender- and age-sensitive public policies. As a direct result of the project’s implementation, older women are now part of community surveillance committees and the municipalities’ round table on poverty reduction. In addition, four emblematic cases of violations of women’s rights were reviewed and, to date, one case has been decided in favour of the survivor; the remaining three are pending decisions.
In 2018, the UN Trust Fund published a technical annex to its Annual Report of 2017, providing an update on the results framework of its strategic plan, 2015–2020. As the first such report to be produced by the UN Trust Fund in its 20-year history, it involved the development of indicators, methods and systems to collect data, including input from, and in consultation with, more than 70 grantee organizations. As a result, the framework has been simplified to include three tiers of result types in order to better reflect which results can be attributed to the secretariat of the UN Trust Fund and which are achieved by the organizations themselves through the Trust Fund grant. A mid-term review of the current Trust Fund’s strategic plan was initiated in 2018, and the report is scheduled to be issued in early 2019.
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 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.
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).
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.