Training and Capacity Building

In 2025, UN Women expanded training and capacity-building to strengthen institutional responses to EVAWG, building on the Essential Services Package and focusing on coordinated, survivor-centred service delivery across health, justice, policing and social sectors.

Across 40 countries, UN Women supported large-scale capacity development, with over 650 organizations strengthening their ability to deliver quality services, goods and resources for women and girls. Targeted initiatives focused on frontline actors, including police, prosecutors, justice officials, service providers and civil society organizations, enhancing capacities in areas such as gender-responsive policing, case management, and psychosocial support.

Concrete results included:

• Distribution of 8,900 gender-sensitive investigation guidelines in Viet Nam, alongside training of police officers
• Training of 60 police personnel in Pakistan on survivor-centred approaches
• Awareness-raising for 80+ members of the UN Strategic Police Advisory Group
• The European Union and UN-Women ACT to End Violence Against Women programme reinforced the leadership, advocacy and capacities of 757 women’s rights organizations, funding 60 of them.

Institutional learning and coordination were further strengthened through innovative approaches, including peer exchange, regional knowledge-sharing and tailored training programmes. The High-Level Network on Gender-Responsive Policing expanded to 22 Member States, reinforcing senior-level commitment to survivor-centred and gender-responsive approaches.

These efforts contributed to improved institutional readiness, enhanced coordination across sectors, and strengthened the quality, consistency and accessibility of services for survivors, including in crisis and complex settings, while supporting the scaling of best practices across regions.

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.

UNFPA has continued to strengthen national and regional capacities to generate, analyze, and use data on violence against women: 

• For the kNOwVAWdata initiative, this includes a comprehensive learning programme that prioritizes safety and ethics in data collection and  use and   tailored technical support. Particular emphasis is placed on building sustainable in-country expertise, supporting national statistical offices, line ministries, and research institutions to institutionalize high-quality VAW data systems.
• Training and capacity-building activities under the Women at the Centre programme were implemented across all project countries to strengthen gender-based violence (GBV) prevention and response systems. These trainings were delivered to caseworkers, social workers, educators, health personnel, outreach workers, and community leaders. Key areas included GBV case management, survivor-centered approaches, referral systems, and Psychological First Aid. In El Salvador and Indonesia, structured certification and accreditation pathways were advanced, including university-based training systems and national institutional partnerships. Specialized training addressed health sector responses, including clinical care for survivors of sexual and intimate partner violence, as well as adolescent-specific GBV risks and prevention of sexual exploitation and abuse (PSEAH). In Madagascar, capacity building also covered disability inclusion and ethical GBV data management, while Zimbabwe emphasized community outreach and curriculum integration into social work education.
• UNFPA has also organized a dedicated internal technical session on the WHO global estimates on violence against women, aimed at strengthening understanding of estimation methods, data limitations, and their implications for national policy and programming.
• The UNFPA regional office in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) developed a virtual course on strategies to prevent Child Marriage and Early Unions (CMEU)
• In  2024, UNFPA led the successful launch of the GBV Case Management (GBV CM) e-learning program, in collaboration with UNHCR, available in four different languages (English, French, Spanish and Arabic). The program has seen widespread interest and participation, reflecting its value and relevance in  strengthening GBV response capacities. This  milestone highlights UNFPA’s collective commitment to enhancing skills and knowledge to better support  survivors of GBV in humanitarian settings.
• UNFPA ASRO completed a regional mapping of SBC approaches and joint tool review and co-joined a six-day Regional SBC ToT, with UNICEF MENARO, for 8 COs (Iraq, Sudan, Egypt, Yemen, Somalia, Jordan, Djibouti, Lebanon) producing actionable work plans and establishing a Regional SBC Community of Practice.
• UNFPA ASRO developed a “UNFPA's Foundational Women-Led Organization Capacity Strengthening Curriculum” a practical training resource designed to bolster the organizational and administrative capacities of women-led and women's rights organizations (WLOs/WROs) in humanitarian and development contexts. Developed through consultations with WLOs across the Arab States, the curriculum addresses capacity gaps identified directly by these organizations.   

In January and February 2025, UNODC conducted training workshops on the use of non-custodial measures in Bangladesh, in partnership with the Judicial Administration Training Institute, delivering training to criminal justice professionals on gender-responsive alternatives to imprisonment in line with the Tokyo Rules and the Bangkok Rules.