United Nations Trust Fund to End Violence against Women

The UN Trust Fund's model combines advocacy and financing with convening, learning and evidence generation. In 2025, this included an independent meta-analysis of evaluations completed across its 2021–2025 Strategic Plan, which confirmed that sustained investment in civil society delivers measurable results, including shifts in harmful social norms, improved access to survivor services, more responsive justice systems and stronger, more resilient women's organizations. The meta-analysis found that 100 per cent of initiatives reviewed demonstrated effectiveness, and nearly two thirds showed measurable impact on violence against women and girls, including in some cases reductions in rates of violence and prevention of harmful norms. This pattern is consistent over more than a decade of UN Trust Fund support. 

The UN Trust Fund also continued to expand its Evaluation Library, as a shared learning asset for partners and the broader ecosystem to end violence against women and girls. It now houses nearly 200 evaluations in English, French and Spanish, 25 added in 2025 alone and is home to one of the largest repositories on what works on EVAW/G.  Finally, 2025 was also a crucial year of funding cuts and backlash, and through the year, the UN Trust Fund continued to elevate how feminist CSOs are confronting growing political resistance, shrinking civic space, and the rollback of hard-won progress.

UN Trust Fund’s SHINE hub, a multilingual (100+ languages) virtual exchange and convening platform, was leveraged to host a global consultation with civil society partners on technology-facilitated gender-based violence, and practitioners shared their prevention and response strategies and their experiences in tackling this specific form of violence. 

UN Trust Fund-supported initiatives enabled 74,300 women and girls to access specialist support services; supported 581,198 women and girls to access information, goods and services to prevent or respond to violence; strengthened 738 institutions to improve survivor-centred service provision; and facilitated access to justice for 7,960 women and girls in cases of violence. The portfolio also prioritized women and girls facing intersecting forms of discrimination and exclusion. In 2025, funded initiatives directly reached over 39,000 women survivors of violence, 12,727 refugee and internally displaced women and girls, 7,444 women and girls with disabilities, 8,828 Indigenous women and girls, and 2,736 lesbian, bisexual and transgender women and girls, and in 2025 alone nearly 100,000 cases of sexual and gender-based violence against women and girls were reported or referred to local state service providers through support provided by the UN Trust Fund grantee partners. Through support from Wellspring Philanthropic, the UN Trust Fund also initiated a series of briefs on practice-based knowledge on essential services for women and girls, highlighting the key role of civil society organizations as service providers across the humanitarian development peace nexus. 

Overall, these efforts improved access to justice, protection and support for survivors, strengthened system-wide coordination, and reinforced survivor-centred approaches at scale across diverse contexts.

In 2025, the UN Trust Fund continued supporting women-led and women’s rights organizations operating in crisis, displacement and humanitarian settings, including through survivor-centred services, psychosocial support, legal aid, referrals and community-based prevention initiatives. Funded initiatives directly reached 12,727 refugee and internally displaced women and girls in 2025, while flexible and adaptive funding approaches enabled frontline organizations to sustain critical services amid escalating humanitarian and funding crises.

The UN Trust Fund has played a key role in elevating women's rights organizations (WRO) leadership in key international human rights and public advocacy spaces throughout 2025. For instance, at the fifty-ninth session of the Human Rights Council, it co-hosted the side event “Voices of Resilience from the Frontlines: Advancing Efforts to End Violence against Women and Girls in the Context of Backlash” with the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) and the UN Women Geneva Office. This event brought together more than 90 feminist leaders, United Nations officials and Member State representatives. It amplified grantee partners’ experiences of adapting and sustaining their work amid escalating backlash and provided a platform to launch the 2025 Call for Proposals, a CFP that generated an unprecedented demand of 2.1 billion USD in funding from civil society partners. 

Through its advocacy, movement-building and community mobilization efforts in 2025, the UN Trust Fund convened 11 global advocacy events featuring 28 grantee partners, facilitated 20 country and regional networking events involving 68 grantee partners, and co-created 83 public advocacy and visibility platforms amplifying feminist advocacy and frontline evidence.

UN Women continued to administer the United Nations Trust Fund to End Violence against Women and Girls (UN Trust Fund), the UN system’s only General Assembly-mandated, inter-agency pooled funding mechanism dedicated exclusively to ending violence against women and girls. Through its inter-agency Programme Advisory Committee (GPAC), comprising representatives from 14 UN entities, civil society and global experts, the UN Trust Fund strengthened system-wide collaboration, strategic alignment and coordinated grant-making approaches across humanitarian, development and peace contexts. In 2025, UN Trust Fund managed an active portfolio totalling USD 74.5 million, supporting 159 civil society and women’s rights organizations across 71 countries and territories, including organizations operating in crisis, displacement and humanitarian settings.

The UN Trust Fund and the Spotlight Initiative also co-led the development of the UN-wide Funding Framework for Women’s Organizations and Civil Society Organizations — a system-wide roadmap to strengthen how the UN funds women’s rights organizations and feminist civil society actors. Guided by an inter-agency task force comprising UN entities, pooled funds and humanitarian actors, the Framework advances six principles to make UN funding more accessible, flexible, predictable and transformative, including through reduced administrative burdens, increased core and flexible funding, strengthened feminist accountability and improved risk-sharing approaches. The Framework builds on the UN Trust Fund’s feminist-informed, demand-driven grant-making model, including multi-year flexible funding, accompaniment and risk-sharing approaches designed to strengthen the resilience and sustainability of women’s rights organizations operating in crisis and backlash contexts.

Organizations that work directly with underserved women, survivors and communities gain valuable insights into effective strategies for addressing violence against women and girls. The UN Trust Fund systematically captures, curates and shares this practice-based knowledge and experience so that all can benefit. This occurs through one-on-one communications with grantee partners, learning exchanges, independent evaluations, thematic knowledge products co-produced with grantee partners, webinars and knowledge cafés.

Key data collection activities initiated during the reporting period include:

• An annual organizational survey among active grantee partners in addition to an annual partner survey introduced by the UN Trust Fund in 2021 to monitor the views of key partners (such as UN agencies, donors, other women’s funds, academic/research institutions and other CSO and WRO partners).
• In 2022, the UN Trust Fund launched SHINE, an online platform developed in collaboration with the Spotlight Initiative, which serves as a knowledge hub for civil society and women’s rights organizations, UN agencies, academics, researchers, practitioners, donors, and the private sector to co-create and amplify evidence-based knowledge that advances the shared goal of ending violence against women and girls.

The UN Trust Fund expands the global knowledge base by curating practice-based knowledge from the initiatives it supports, in co-creation with grantee partners. Between 2021 and 2024, the UN Trust Fund co-produced with civil society organizations a total of 34 knowledge products to codify the practice-based knowledge and learnings of grantee partners, whilst 79 final, external evaluations of grantee initiatives were produced with the support of the UN Trust Fund during this time. 

Finally, the UN Trust Fund also supports grantee partners’ capabilities to generate data and knowledge by providing dedicated funding and delivering tailored trainings and technical support. The eight grants awarded under the ACT programme in 2024 included, for the first time, a specific budget allocation for practice-based knowledge and learnings. An average of 59% of active grantee partners between 2021 and 2024 reported having an ability to produce knowledge or learning on ending violence against women programming with UN Trust Fund support.

Improving access for women and girls to essential, specialist, safe and adequate multisectoral services is a core strategic priority of the UN Trust Fund, and one of the three outcome areas in its Strategic Plan 2021-2025.

Between 2021 and 2024, an average of 70% of initiatives supported by the UN Trust Fund per year included strategies to prevent violence against women. 

During that period, a total of 218,147 women and girls used specialist services to heal and recover from violence, and 41,615 individual providers improved service for survivors and women and girls at risk.

In Egypt, UN Trust Fund partners addressed growing, critical gaps in services for refugee women and girls primarily from Sudan, Eritrea and South Sudan. In 2024, some 520 young mothers – many of them survivors of violence – received tailored support, including mental healthcare, to improve their ability to cope. The initiatives also provided 872 individuals with psychosocial support, emergency cash grants and referrals, while promoting longer-term recovery through vocational training and small business support. 

An intervention by the Greater Women Initiative for Health and Right (GWIHR) in Nigeria’s Rivers State has enhanced accessibility to services, institutional accountability, and legal protection for female and transgender sex workers, who face systemic discrimination. Thanks to peer-driven human rights education, in 2024 over 2,500 sex workers reported abuses and pursued legal action against perpetrators. GWIHR handled 327 gender-based violence cases and connected nearly 500 survivors to support services.

The prevention of violence against women and girls through changes in behaviours, practices and attitudes is a core strategic priority of the UN Trust Fund, and one of the three outcome areas in its Strategic Plan 2021-2025.

Between 2021 and 2024, an average of 80% of initiatives supported by the UN Trust Fund per year included strategies to prevent violence against women and girls.

In the same period, grantee partners engaged 39,261 community leaders, 7,325 faith leaders, 11,843 traditional leaders and 16,702 youth leaders to publicly advocate for changes in behaviours, practices and attitudes towards violence against women and girls, including changing harmful practices.

Almost 361,000 women and girls were supported between 2021 and 2024 to build skills and capacities in self-efficacy, agency, assertiveness and self-confidence through support from UN Trust Fund grantees (for example, through economic and social empowerment initiatives as a protective factor against violence against women and girls). An average of 316 evidence and/or practice-based methodologies, approaches or models were developed and/or implemented every year to achieve or advance changes in behaviour and social norms aimed at preventing violence against women and girls through UN Trust Fund grantees.

For instance, in 2024, Leap Girl Africa used podcast and in-person sessions with couples in Cameroon to foster dialogue and reflection within intimate partnerships, helping challenge harmful beliefs about gender roles and redefine what healthy, equitable relationships can look like. The intervention led to measurable shifts in social norms and reported rates of emotional and physical intimate partner violence nearly halved within three months. Jan Sahas in India established balika panchayats (girls' councils) that engaged 1,542 girls in leadership development, equipping them with legal literacy and negotiation skills. They also conducted awareness sessions for men and boys addressing issues such as consent. School-based programmes reached 23,498 students.