United Nations Trust Fund to End Violence against Women
220 East 42nd Street, 21st Floor New York, NY 11226, USA
https://www.unwomen.org/en/trust-funds/un-trust-fund-to-end-violence-against-women
Background
The United Nations Trust Fund in Support of Actions to Eliminate Violence against Women (UN Trust Fund) is the only global, multilateral, inter-agency grant-making mechanism exclusively focused on ending violence against women and girls. Established by General Assembly resolution 50/166 in 1996 and managed by UN-Women, the Fund provides vital resources to civil society and women's rights organizations to prevent violence against women and girls; improve access to adequate essential, multisectoral services for survivors; and support effective implementation of laws and policies.
Since its inception, the UN Trust Fund has invested over $240 million in 706 survivor-centered initiatives across 140 countries and territories, advancing Sustainable Development Goal 5 by translating global gender equality commitments into concrete action and bridging grassroots women's movements with international policy frameworks, as well as multiple other Sustainable Development Goals.
The UN Trust Fund recognizes that civil society organizations, particularly women-led and women’s rights organizations, drive the most effective and sustainable efforts to end violence against women and girls. Through dedicated flexible funding, it directly contributes to UN-Women's Strategic Plan 2022-2025, strengthening "Women's voice, leadership, and agency" (Outcome 5) and advancing "Ending violence against women and girls" (Impact 3).
By providing core support covering general operating costs, contingency planning, and staff wellbeing, the UN Trust Fund seeks to strengthen grantee partners’ organizational resilience, enabling organizations to withstand challenges, particularly in volatile environments. Its intentional intersectional approach prioritizes initiatives addressing multiple forms of discrimination, ensuring resources reach particularly marginalized women and girls. Strategically positioned within the UN ecosystem, it connects its partner organizations with UN entities, donors, and policymakers, nurturing innovation, elevating frontline voices, and catalyzing collaboration to strengthen collective knowledge and resources. Based on grantee partners’ experience addressing violence against women and girls, the UN Trust Fund also co-creates knowledge resources to inform more effective approaches across the field.
The Mid-Term Review of the 2021-2025 Strategic Plan (MTR),[1] published in 2024, reaffirmed that the UN Trust Fund has a unique role in providing long-term, flexible funding to grassroots and women’s rights organizations, in particular those operating in high-risk and crisis settings. It emphasized that the UN Trust Fund provides excellent value for money and lives up to its ambition of being more than a traditional donor. The MTR also found that stronger communication efforts were needed to mor effectively convey the UN Trust Fund’s distinctive and strategic role as well as to ensure the achievements of grantee partners were fully recognized and amplified.
[1] Mid-Term Review of the UN Trust Fund Strategic Plan 2021-2025 (UN Women, 2024)
Areas of Focus
The UN Trust Fund’s priority areas of focus include:
- Improving access to essential specialist, safe and adequate services, including access to justice, for survivors for those at risk of violence.
- Transforming social norms, a key factor in preventing violence against women and girls.
- Ensuring more effective legislation, policies and national action plans that are shaped by women and girls in decision-making processes.
Resources
UN Trust Fund website: http://untf.unwomen.org/en
UN Trust Fund Learning hub, including practice-based knowledge products, strategic assessments, and evaluations: https://untf.unwomen.org/en/learning-hub
UN Trust Fund publications: http://untf.unwomen.org/en/digital-library/publications
The importance of up-scaling efforts to prevent violence against women is increasingly being acknowledged both by the international community and by civil society organizations. The SASA! methodology is a ground-breaking community mobilization approach developed by Raising Voices for the primary prevention of violence against women and HIV transmission. The methodology has been rigorously evaluated through a randomized controlled trial which demonstrated that SASA! is an effective approach, leading to a 52 per cent reduction in the risk of physical partner violence against women in communities where it was implemented. As a result, a wide range of actors, including NGOs, governments, UN agencies and faith-based groups are up-scaling implementation of this innovative and evidence-based approach. Currently, the SASA! methodology is being implemented in over 20 countries by more than 60 organizations. From 2010 to 2012, the UN Trust Fund supported Raising Voices’ first cohort of organizations across Eastern and Southern Africa to up-scale the SASA! methodology. Building on the learning from this previous grant as well as the increasing requests around the world to implement SASA!, this project works to meet the need for improved learning from, and guidance for, the wide range of organizations using and/or planning to use the SASA! methodology. Raising Voices collaborates with three partner organizations implementing SASA!—in rural Tanzania, in refugee camps in Kenya and in a community in Haiti—to improve guidance on how to adapt the methodology most effectively, maximizing the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of interventions. To date, two rounds of data collection have occurred in the research sites leading to key lessons about how to adapt the SASA! methodology in diverse settings. For example, in Kenya, SASA! is being adapted in the Dadaab Refugee Camp by the International Rescue Committee across their prevention work. Overall the methodology has been highly regarded by project staff and participants. The data collected to date shows that behaviours and attitudes are changing and community members are explicitly denouncing all forms of violence against women as unacceptable. Important lessons are also being learned though, on the importance of actively involving religious leaders and adapting the materials to suit the Somali culture prevalent in the camp. Tools will now be developed for use by other NGOs to help adapt the successful methodology to other contexts.