Spotlight Inititative
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.
Spotlight Initiative has played a critical role in addressing femicide, with a strong emphasis on Latin America, where the issue is both highly prevalent and deeply institutionalized.
View MoreSpotlight Initiative has played a critical role in addressing femicide, with a strong emphasis on Latin America, where the issue is both highly prevalent and deeply institutionalized. The region has some of the highest femicide rates in the world, making it a thematic focus of the Latin America Regional Programme and national programmes in Mexico, Ecuador, Honduras, and El Salvador. Latin America has also been at the forefront of policy advancements and public discourse on femicide, making it a key area for targeted interventions aimed at structural and cultural change.
The Initiative takes a holistic approach to eliminating femicide, implementing mutually reinforcing interventions across all key areas. Spotlight Initiative worked simultaneously to reform laws, strengthen institutions, shift harmful gender norms, improve services for survivors, generate data, and support women’s rights movements. By working across multiple levels—national, regional, and grassroots—the Initiative ensured that reforms were both sustainable and impactful.
Ecuador provides a clear example of this comprehensive model in action. The country saw the implementation of the Femicide Reparation Policy, which set new legal standards for addressing femicide cases, ensuring justice for victims and reparation for families. In parallel, prevention campaigns such as the Flores en el Aire initiative helped raise awareness by digitally mapping femicide cases and sharing testimonies from families of victims. Improved access to services, including forensic support and protection mechanisms, further strengthened the national response, while enhanced data collection allowed for better monitoring and accountability.
In Mexico, legal reforms were central to the strategy, with 31 federal laws and 49 state laws updated to improve prevention, punishment for perpetrators, and reparation for survivors. These legal changes were accompanied by nationwide public awareness campaigns designed to challenge harmful gender norms and social attitudes that perpetuate violence against women. Institutional strengthening also played a key role, with targeted training for police officers and judicial actors to improve their ability to handle femicide cases effectively. A critical milestone in the region’s efforts to combat femicide was the development of a statistical model for measuring gender-related killings, which was officially approved by UN Statistics in 2022. This model provides a standardized framework for tracking and analyzing femicide data, ensuring that policymakers and institutions have reliable, evidence-based tools to guide prevention and response efforts. The adoption of this model has significantly enhanced national and regional capacities to monitor trends, identify risk factors, and implement targeted interventions.
In Honduras, the Cure Violence Model was implemented to prevent femicide at the community level. This approach involved deploying violence interrupters—trusted community members trained to de-escalate potentially lethal conflicts and mediate disputes. Within its first six months, the programme intervened in 662 violent incidents, safeguarding the lives of 133 women. Over time, it has prevented 1,770 highly volatile incidents, with 65 percent directly related to preventing femicide. The initiative has also facilitated the safe relocation of at-risk women and children, reinforcing the importance of community-led violence prevention strategies.
El Salvador has been another focal point for targeted research and policy interventions. The Initiative supported studies on femicide in vulnerable groups, providing essential data to inform national policies. At the same time, judicial training programmes ensured that legal practitioners were better equipped to investigate and prosecute femicide cases. Strengthening the institutional framework and improving judicial responses have been key to closing gaps in the legal system and providing survivors and their families with greater access to justice.
At the regional level, the Latin America Regional Programme has advanced knowledge production by publishing eight multidimensional studies on femicide in highly vulnerable contexts—such as structural poverty, human mobility, trafficking, disappearances of women and girls, and organized crime. These studies highlight the intersectional impacts of emerging forms of violence and provide guidelines and policy recommendations to generate new actions that respond to the complexity of the phenomenon. By documenting and analyzing these dimensions, the Initiative has contributed to a deeper understanding of femicide as a structural issue, helping shape evidence-based policy responses across the region.
These country-level and regional interventions demonstrate how the Spotlight Initiative’s holistic approach, when implemented at scale, can lead to meaningful change. By integrating legal, institutional, prevention, and service-based interventions, the Initiative has created a model that not only addresses femicide but also provides a roadmap for other regions facing similar crises. The Latin America Regional Programme played a critical role in coordinating efforts across countries, ensuring that best practices and lessons learned were shared to maximize impact. The success of these interventions underscores the need for sustained investment in comprehensive strategies to combat femicide and gender-based violence worldwide