United Nations Population Fund

UNFPA provides direct technical assistance to governments in developing, strengthening, and implementing policies for GBV prevention, response, and survivor support. This includes legal frameworks, national action plans, standard operating procedures (SOPs), emergency preparedness and response plans, and gender-sensitive policies across humanitarian, peace, and development contexts. UNFPA collaborates with ministries, parliamentarians, and other stakeholders to integrate GBV prevention into national development plans, social protection systems, and SRHR policies, including Universal Health Coverage. 

At the global and regional levels, UNFPA supports key international frameworks such as the Beijing Platform for Action, the SDGs, and UN Security Council Resolutions. 

Notable achievements include: 

• Nigeria: Strengthened partnership with the First Lady, leading to the first National Summit on Social Norms and GBV, which resulted in a national commitment to upholding the dignity and rights of women and girls. 
• North Macedonia (2021–2024): Supported a Multi-Sectoral Response Protocol, facilitated 11 bylaws (7 adopted), developed SOPs for Sexual Assault Referral Centres, finalized a survivor reintegration program, and supported the evaluation of the National Action Plan on implementing the Istanbul Convention (2018–2023), endorsed in 2024. 
• Latin America & the Caribbean: Advanced survivor-centred approaches in multi-sectoral response protocols across nine countries (Mexico, Peru, El Salvador, Panama, the Dominican Republic, Bolivia, Guatemala, Honduras, and Ecuador). 

UNFPA plays a pivotal role in addressing sexual violence in conflict by adopting a comprehensive approach focused on prevention, response, and survivor support, ensuring that survivors’ needs are met and their rights upheld. UNFPA collaborates with governments, humanitarian organizations, and civil society to provide essential services to women and girls affected by conflict-related sexual violence (CRSV). 

As the Inter-Agency Standing Committee (IASC) mandated agency for GBV prevention and response, UNFPA leads and supports multi-sectoral responses to GBV, including CRSV, coordinating efforts across health, legal, protection, and psychosocial sectors. This includes establishing GBV Sub-Clusters in humanitarian settings to coordinate responses, share information, and prevent duplication of efforts. 

As a member of UN Action Against Sexual Violence in Conflict and other global initiatives, UNFPA works to strengthen system-wide responses, supporting UN Security Council Resolutions on Women, Peace, and Security (1325, 1820, 1888, 1960) and collaborating with UNICEF, UN Women, and UNHCR to ensure a comprehensive approach to sexual violence in conflict. 

In 2024, UNFPA, with funding from the UN Action Multi-Partner Trust Fund (MPTF), directly supported CRSV survivors in Sudan, South Sudan, Ukraine, and Mali. Data collected through the GBVIMS on CRSV is shared with the Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Arrangements (MARA), adhering to strict safety and ethical protocols in countries such as South Sudan, Mali, Central African Republic, Somalia, and Iraq. UNFPA also co-leads MARA Working Groups in Myanmar, Mali, and the Central African Republic, strengthening responses through a survivor-centered approach. 

2024 highlights:  

• ASRO provides tailored support to seven crisis-affected countries (Sudan, Palestine, Somalia, Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen, Libya), offering essential medical supplies, GBV survivor assistance, MHPSS, and safe spaces for women and girls. It also supported 42 women-led organizations and enhanced GBV coordination in humanitarian contexts. 
• In Palestine, ASRO partnered with OHCHR for training on CRSV and safe referral processes. 
• WCARO worked with WHO to strengthen clinical management of rape (CMR) capacities, conducting ToT sessions in Côte d'Ivoire and Chad, and planning cascade training in Niger, Central African Republic, Chad, and Mali. 
• UNFPA Nigeria piloted a national CMR ToT focused on testing the new CMR-IPV inter-agency toolkit. 

UNFPA plays a pivotal role in supporting governments to develop legislation that is responsive to the needs of survivors while aligning with international laws and human rights standards. Through its technical expertise, human resources, and financial support, UNFPA supports governments in the development and implementation of national laws that effectively address GBV and ensure the protection of survivors. 

One notable example of UNFPA’s advocacy efforts is its successful work in The Gambia, where it helped uphold the 2015 law criminalizing FGM. UNFPA countered repeal efforts by providing technical support, fostering regional partnerships, engaging with parliamentarians, and collaborating strategically with religious and civil society leaders. This work highlights the importance of multifaceted approaches to legislative advocacy and survivor protection. 

UNFPA has also supported legal framework strengthening and the development of National Action Plans for GBV response across the EECA region (Eastern Europe and Central Asia). In 17 EECA countries, the focus has been on domestic violence prevention, protection, and survivor support, which reflects UNFPA’s comprehensive approach to legislation and policy development. 

Progress at regional and national level: 

• In Latin America, UNFPA has advanced critical GBV legislation. Notable achievements include the passage of comprehensive laws in Chile and bans on child marriage and early unions in Peru and Colombia. These legislative advancements demonstrate UNFPA’s active role in shaping policies that prioritize the rights and protection of women and girls in the region. 
• In the Arab States, UNFPA has partnered with the Arab Institute for Human Rights to build capacity in 9 countries for addressing violence against women and girls (VAWG) through the Universal Periodic Review (UPR) reporting process. This partnership highlights UNFPA’s commitment to improving accountability and monitoring mechanisms for human rights issues in the region. 

UNFPA is committed to strengthening the capacity of governments, implementing partners, and its own staff to prevent and respond to GBV effectively. Through comprehensive training and capacity-building initiatives, UNFPA equips all actors involved in GBV prevention and response with the necessary knowledge, skills, and systems. 

• As of February 2025, 300 participants from 67 countries have completed the kNOwVAWdata course, focusing on safe, ethical VAW data collection, analysis, and reporting. 
• ASRO supported Al-Azhar in conducting TOT workshops for students from Somalia, Djibouti, Sudan, and Yemen, training future religious leaders to address GBV, FGM, and child marriage. ASRO also helped develop a framework for a Religious Leaders Network to enhance collaboration in combating harmful practices. 
• In EECA, UNFPA strengthened multi-sectoral responses to GBV through regional ToT workshops, training 35 stakeholders per country and developing tools for monitoring and implementing standard operating procedures. 
• PSRO developed and rolled out a GBV Risk Mitigation Curriculum for the Pacific Sub-Region, focusing on climate disaster contexts, across 4 countries. 
• WCARO conducted capacity-building workshops on the Essential Services Package and GBV case management in The Gambia and Equatorial Guinea for UN personnel, government officials, and partners. 
• ​​​In LAC, UNFPA developed 3 self-administered virtual courses on the Essential Services Package, clinical management of sexual violence, and child marriage prevention, reaching over 10,000 public servants across 15 countries. From these courses, a community of practice was established, running from 2020 to 2022 and generating 20 webinars on GBV, with 1.6k subscribers and 198k views.  Moreover, since 2021, UNFPA and PAHO have developed a course on the clinical management of sexual violence in Latin America. The course has been disseminated at the regional level and is currently being rolled out by the ministries of health in four countries: El Salvador, Brazil, Guatemala, and Ecuador. 

UNFPA engages in advocacy and policy dialogue at national, regional and global levels, to accelerate action towards ending gender-based violence and harmful practices. By the end of 2020, as many as 114 UNFPA Regional and Country Offices were involved in strengthening national legislation and policy.

For example, Gender-biased Sex Selection and Son Preference programmes are spearheading a movement to end GBSS through the development of national costed action plans, policy and legal reforms as well as through a broad sweeping social movement aimed at changing harmful gender norms that drive male preference.

Ending violence against women is at the core of UNFPA’s mandate, as reflected in the three transformative results to be achieved by 2030: ending the unmet need for family planning, ending preventable maternal deaths, and ending gender-based violence and all harmful practices against women and girls.

UNFPA is focused on accelerating and maximizing the positive impact of life-saving, gender-transformative GBV programming for women and girls in all their diversity, including escalating social norm change programme interventions to address the root causes of violence.

UNFPA contributed to the Generation Equality Forum from its outset, from advocating for the creation of a coalition on sexual and reproductive health and rights and becoming a co-lead in the Action Coalition on Bodily Autonomy and Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights, contributing to the GBV Action Coalition and providing technical contributions to the development of the Action Coalition Blueprint.

UNFPA has demonstrated capacity to adapt to the new circumstances derived from the COVID- 19 pandemic. Almost all UNFPA offices, that is 99% of offices in 108 countries, have adapted their GBV interventions to this new context.

Prevention and response services had to be moved to the online space and an increase in GBV, as well as additional threats and forms of violence have been reported across the world. UNFPA has effectively responded to these new challenges and the lessons learned will be applied to future regional and global challenges. For example, in Latin America, UNFPA created a regional Community of Practice for Essential Services to respond to violence in the context of COVID-19. In 2021, reports on the impact of COVID-19 on gender equality and GBV were published in Asia Pacific (“COVID-19 and Violence against Women: The evidence behind the talk”) and East and Southern Africa (“Impact of COVID-19 on Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment in East and Southern Africa”). These publications gather data on GBV during the pandemic which show an increase in reporting of VAW, including technology-facilitated violence.

UNFPA leads the GBV Area of responsibility under the global protection cluster which is part of the IASC established coordination mechanism/architecture in humanitarian settings. As of 2021, UNFPA coordinates GBV response and prevention programmes in 35 humanitarian settings.

UNFPA contributed to Inter-Agency Humanitarian Evaluation (IAHE) Steering Group Review of Progress on Mainstreaming Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women and Girls into the Humanitarian, Development, and Peace Nexus Agenda and in the work going forward to promote strengthened mainstreaming in the triple nexus process.

UNFPA actively engages with the 16 Days of Activism with concerted efforts to move from activism to accountability. To reinforce accountability frameworks, we support training for health workers, police and judges to help them respond sensitively and appropriately to GBV survivors; and support the creation of laws and protocols that ensure the protection of survivors.

Since 2008 UNFPA, jointly with UNICEF, leads the largest global programme to accelerate the elimination of female genital mutilation (FGM) in 17 countries.

Since 2016 UNFPA, jointly with UNICEF, has been implementing the Global Programme to End Child Marriage across Africa, the Middle East and South Asia in 12 of the highest-prevalence and/or high-burden countries.

UNFPA is implementing with the The European Union and other UN Agencies the Spotlight initiative, focused on eliminating all forms of violence against women and girls in 26 countries. UNFPA leads or co-leads a number of programmes related to prevention, strengthened provision of comprehensive GBV and SRHR services,collection and use of data, as well as contributing to interventions across all pillars of the initiative.

On 12 March 2021, as part of the 65th session on the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW), UNFPA, in collaboration with the European Commission and the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (NORAD), held a virtual inter-ministerial dialogue that resulted in countries committing to 10 points to action towards ending GBSS. 

GBV is increasingly a characteristic of conflict and is often perpetrated against women and girls; and, in some instances, has been used as a tactic of war, UNFPA collaborates with the Office of the Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Children and Armed Conflict and is a member of the Steering Committee as well as the Expert Advisory Group. UNFPA contributions are to ensure the particular needs of adolescent girls and women as a result of sexual violence are factored in efforts of the Special Representative to address reintegration. UNFPA contributed to the development of high-level papers and to the SG Reports.

UNFPA supports the global geospatial knowledge platform to assist in knowledge sharing related to the prevalence of intimate partner violence for 119 countries and their subregions. A geospatial dashboard on IPV was launched in December 2020, and an accompanying report on IPV data was published in May 2021. 

During emergencies, UNFPA is a lead agency in enabling safe and ethical service data collection and management, including coordinating the GBV Information Management System (GBVIMS) Steering Committee (UNFPA, UNICEF, UNHCR, IRC and IMC). Online (Primero/GBVIMS+) and offline (GBVIMS) GBV case management and incident monitoring systems facilitate safe and ethical GBV data collection and sharing in order to support a continuous process of evaluation in the improvement and coordination of services to ensure that survivor-centered care is supported, and support quality service provision by providing a set of tools which help service providers to support survivors in an integrated manner. GBVIMS and GBVIMS+ are currently used by 159 non-governmental organisations (139 national and 20 international) and engage 12 UN entities in 25 countries. 

At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, UNFPA was at the forefront in projecting the impact of women and girls. In April 2020, UNFPA, Avenir Health and Johns Hopkins University published modelled data on the impact of the pandemic on gender-based violence, female genital mutilation and child marriage. This model has been highly cited to exemplify the devastating effects of the pandemic on efforts to end VAW. UNFPA estimated that if the lockdown continued for 6 months, 31 million additional gender-based violence cases could be expected, and for every 3 months of continued lockdown, an additional 15 million additional cases of gender-based violence were to be expected. It was also estimated that 2 million cases of FGM and 13 million cases of child marriage that could have been otherwise prevented, would occur as a consequence of the pandemic.

UNFPA is undergoing a costing exercise for GBV programs at country level. By August 2021, the cost of UNFPA’s GBV prevention and response programmes had been estimated for 9 countries.

As of 2021, 15 GBV prevalence surveys and 24 countries have benefited from the kNOwVAW data capacity building initiative.  This initiative also supported 9 countries in the Asia Pacific to publish reports with findings of a VAW prevalence survey.

In November 2020, the East Asia and Pacific Regional Offices of UNFPA, UN Women and UNICEF launched a joint study exploring and illustrating the interlinkages between violence against women and violence against children in four countries, namely Cambodia, Papua New Guinea, the Philippines and Viet Nam.