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 UN Trust Fund to End Violence Against Women (UN Trust Fund) is the only global grant-making mechanism that is dedicated exclusively to addressing all forms of violence against women and girls. The UN Trust Fund raises and distributes funds to support multi-year demand-driven projects to address, prevent and ultimately end violence against women and girls in three priority areas: improving access for women and girls to essential, safe and adequate multi-sectorial services; furthering the implementation of legislation, policies, national action plans and accountability systems; and promoting the prevention of violence against women and girls. Over the past 25 years, its grantees have impacted the lives of women and girls in every region, addressing complex and diverse forms of violence against women and girls through innovative projects driven by the demands of their particular contexts. In 2020, the UN Trust Fund supported 150 projects aimed at preventing and addressing violence against women and girls with grants totalling 72.8 million in 71 countries and territories across five regions.
In 2020, 242,599 women and girls directly benefitted from support that let to transformative changes in their lives by UN Trust Fund grantees. The projects provided life-saving services and empowered women and girls directly, including changing the lives of a minimum of 26,519 survivors of violence, 21,040 women and girls with disabilities and 11,747 refugee and internally displaced women and girls. In total, the UN Trust Fund grantees reaches 31,071,058 people in 2020, aiming to create safe and thriving environments for women and girls.
The work of the UN Trust Fund and its grantees in 2020 and 2021 continued to be marked by the impact of the global COVID-19 pandemic and the adverse consequences generated by measures undertaken to curb its spread. The UN Trust Fund responded promptly to the crisis by putting in place a 5-point action plan to assist grantees in adapting their interventions to the new context generated by the COVID-19 crisis. The UN Trust Fund subsequently consolidated essential data from Civil Society Organisations and Women’s Rights Organisations (CSOs/WROs) into two knowledge briefs providing key insights to inform partners’ advocacy, policy and funding decisions.
In response to challenges that were jeopardising current projects, and in some cases threatening institutional survival, in partnership with the European Union and the United Nations Spotlight Initiative (EU/UN Spotlight Initiative) an additional USD 9 million was allocated for immediate and ongoing support to 44 UN Trust Fund grantees in sub-Saharan Africa.
In addition, the UN Trust Fund launched its Strategic Plan 2021-2025, which is grounded in the right of all women and girls to live free of violence. It seeks to achieve this goal through global solidarity and partnerships that enable civil society organisations, especially women’s rights organisations, to deliver survivor-centred and demand-driven initiatives to help feminist movements grow globally.
The new Strategic Plan is based on extensive consultations with stakeholders, donors and grantees, who called for key details including:
Increased flexible funding and more grants that cover longer periods;
Opportunities to pilot and test innovative approaches to ending violence against women and girls;
Increased resources to support and build the capacity of civil society organisations and women’s rights organisations; and
More space for knowledge-sharing, learning and dialogue among grantees.
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.
A project in Cambodia is being implemented by ADD International in partnership with local organizations to empower disabled women’s networks and strengthen their capacity to lead primary prevention efforts in six districts in which domestic violence is reported to be high. The target of the project is violence committed by relatives and caregivers against women and girls with disabilities. The aim of the project is to strengthen the capacity of women-led organizations that work for people with disabilities so that they may more effectively support women and girls through prevention interventions. Also under that programme, women and girls with disabilities will be trained to become volunteer role models and a methodology will be developed to analyse the incidence and causes of gender-based violence. The methodology will be disseminated in Cambodia and internationally.
Training and capacity-building remained a key area of the UN Trust Fund’s work both online and in face-to-face workshops. For example, the fund has implemented 10 online training modules, developed in 2017, on how to ensure accountability for grants, in accordance with the Project Cooperation Agreement, including sessions on project design, monitoring and evaluation; financial and operational management; and ethics and safety. The course is open to new Trust Fund grantees and their implementing partners and is offered as refresher training to all current grantees. By December 2018, the sessions had been delivered live in three languages and recorded to ensure wider participation and share knowledge. In September 2018, the Trust Fund held a five-day knowledge-exchange workshop in Amman, involving eight current and new grantees working on ending violence against women and girls in humanitarian contexts. The event provided an opportunity for grantees to obtain access to training to respond to programmatic and operational gaps in capacity, exchange learning and knowledge and document knowledge in a format that can be used for both internal and external purposes.
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).