Training and Capacity Building
220 East 42nd Street
New York, NY 10017
Background
Launched in 2017 with an initial investment of over 500 million USD from the European Union, Spotlight Initiative is the United Nations Secretary-General’s High Impact Initiative to end violence against women and girls (EVAWG). Recognized as one of the 12 High-Impact Initiatives – driving progress across the sustainable development goals – Spotlight Initiative represents an unprecedented global effort to address violence against women and girls at scale.
During its first phase (2017- 2023), Spotlight Initiative helped cohere the UN system to implement 34 programmes across five regions. This included two civil society grant-making programmes – established in collaboration with the UN Trust to End Violence against Women and the Women’s Peace and Humanitarian Fund – which helped channel additional resources directly to civil society. By fostering a “One UN” approach under the leadership of the Resident Coordinators at the country level, Spotlight Initiative has leveraged various UN agencies’ complementary expertise, deepened collaboration, and streamlined operational processes, allowing for stronger programme delivery and better results for women and girls.
Through its deep partnerships at country and regional level – including with governments, civil society, faith-based and traditional leaders, academic institutions, media, the private sector, and others – Spotlight Initiative drove significant progress across response and prevention efforts. A strong commitment to meaningful engagement with civil society in particular, including local and grassroots organisations and feminist and women’s rights groups, has been central to the Initiative’s approach, as well. Under its first phase, nearly half of the Initiative’s activity funds were channeled directly to civil society, ensuring local ownership, buy-in, and sustainability of the Initiative's investments. At the global level, the Initiative forged a range of strategic partnerships, including with the Group of Friends, a coalition of 93 UN Member States advocating to end violence against women and girls, and the UN Foundation, which helped launch the WithHer Fund to channel more funding directly to local organizations.
Through its comprehensive approach – working to pass progressive laws and policies, strengthen institutions, deepen prevention programming, improve access to services, and generate data, and by centering partnerships – particularly with civil society – the Initiative has been shown to be 70% to 90% more effective at reducing the prevalence of violence against women and girls than siloed, single-pillar approaches. By aligning its interventions with national and local priorities, Spotlight Initiative works to deepen capacity, political will, and long-term commitment to ending violence against women and girls and advancing gender equality and women’s rights.
Areas of Focus
Unique to the Initiative is a whole-of-society approach that places ending violence against women and girls at the heart of national development priorities and gives local communities the tools they need to address violence in their specific context. The model works to support the development and revision of gender responsive laws and policies; strengthen institutions and data collection on VAWG; promote gender-equitable attitudes and positive social norms, and provide quality services for survivors of violence and their families. It does this work in partnerships with government and, critically, with civil society and women’s movements at every level, enhancing civic space and driving sustainable, transformative change.
In Afghanistan, with support from the WHO, the Ministry of Public Health is training nearly 7000 health providers and upgrading health facilities in all provinces over the next 5 years to deliver Gender Based Violence services to survivors based on implementation of a national treatment protocol and the WHO clinical handbook for responding to intimate partner violence or sexual violence. In Uganda, health providers in 3 districts were trained based on updated national training guidelines to deliver care and services for GBV to survivors. Similar efforts are underway in India and Namibia.
In Viet Nam, UN Women supported capacity building to better respond to violence against women by assisting the Judicial Academy, the national judicial training institution. With UN Women’s support, the Judicial Academy now has a training modules which will be used to train prospective judges, prosecutors and lawyers on international standards to address VAW. To accompany the training module, a casebook containing 100 cases of domestic and sexual violence and video clips were finalized after being piloted with lecturers, trainers and practitioners from multiple institutions.
ESCWA has delivered relevant capacity-building workshops on Violence against Women. Specifically, ESCWA Centre for Women organized in Cairo in 2014 a national workshop on the formulation of a legislative framework to protect women and girls from all forms of violence. Furthermore, ESCWA Centre for Women delivered a relevant capacity-building workshop on addressing Gender-Based Violence in the Arab region through the toolkit for service providers produced in 2015.
In Mexico, UNODC continued to provide normative assistance on criminal justice and prison reform with emphasis on training and awareness-raising on violence against women.
In the Central African Republic, IOM is working to prevent SGBV among internally-displaced and host populations. IOM is building capacity among National Police and Gendarmerie forces to respond adequately to SGBV case reports, in coordination with UN Civil Police / CIVPOL. In this effort, IOM is also advocating for the increased recruitment of female police officers. These efforts will provide police with the tools to use a survivor-centred approach, as well as educate them in relation to Central African legislation and international human rights law on rape as a war crime.
In Palestine, UNODC published a manual for forensic medical practitioners and a code of practice to aid healthcare practitioners in examining victims of sexual and gender-based violence in accordance with international best practices.
As part of the Phase II of the UNFPA-UNICEF Joint Programme on FGM/C, to strengthen the inter-linkages between VAWG and harmful practices such as FGM/C, and address the root causes of such violence, UN Women has developed is developing policy document on essential elements to end FGM/C as a form of VAWG, in addition to a training module on gender and FGM/C, to accompany the UNFPA-UNICEF Manual on Social Norms and Change.
In Africa, training sessions were organized in 2013 and 2015 under the auspices of the UNiTE campaign for representatives from the Defense Forces, Police institutions and Correctional Services. Participants received training to enhance the capacity of Africa Security Organs to prevent and respond to violence against women and girls in conflict and post-conflict situations.
ILO's Better Work Programme has conducted trainings on sexual harassment in the garment sector factories targeting workers, supervisors and mid-level managers. The trainings have mainly been conducted in Jordan (more than 40 trainings in 2015 and 2016), Cambodia (more than 20 in 2015) and Vietnam. In Lesotho, a roundtable discussion was conducted with workers and managers, followed by training on prevention of sexual harassment. The Programme has also developed toolkits and guidelines to prevent and address sexual harassment in the factories for the different countries.
In Egypt, UNODC contributed to the government's strengthening of its response to violence against women and girls and began developing training manuals on the appropriate handling of such cases by police and prosecutors.