United Nations Trust Fund to End Violence against Women

From 2017-2020, at least 23,089 service providers around the world have improved their provision of services for women survivors of violence and those at-risk, supported by UN Trust Fund grantees. Ensuring access to essential and adequate services was a cornerstone of many grantees’ COVID-19 response plans in 2020. In addition, grantees reached 72,629 rights holders/beneficiaries with food, hygiene supplies, sanitation and/or with other emergency need parcels in order to ensure the stability of their project and reach those who were most marginalized and at risk. Grantees took action to provide immediate support such as cash-based or in-kind assistance, to ensure the survival of beneficiaries. Grantees rapidly adapted their service provision in light of the pandemic. For example, in Chad, the Public Interest Law Center created a temporary shelter, beyond its permanent counselling centres, to provide additional support for women in need. In the State of Palestine, the Women’s Centre for Legal Aid and Counselling, in collaboration with the Ministry of Social Development, advocated for transitional shelters, where women could quarantine before entering shelters, in accordance with COVID-19 regulations. Results in 2020 on ensuring access to services for women and girl survivors of violence, in the context of COVID-19, included important adaptations and responses from grantees globally. Hide

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.

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Stars of Hope Society, the only association in Palestine that is managed by women with disabilities for women with disabilities, is using a grant from the UN Trust Fund to improve access to essential, safe and adequate multisectoral services. In the first six months of 2019, the grantee built out its infrastructure of the project and, in particular, on carrying out a context analysis and building capacity. As part of that effort it produced a disability mainstreaming manual and trained 22 representatives of organizations for women with disabilities on ending violence against women and girls. As part of efforts to mainstream disability in data collection on violence, the grantee persuaded the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics to include in its data collection team four female sign language interpreters, one of whom is living with disabilities.

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Early and child marriage was the focus of a project implemented in Pakistan by the Sindh Community Foundation. The overall goal was to ensure that girls in 30 villages in three districts of Sindh province were better protected from being forced into early marriage. In the final evaluation, it was found that the project had increased knowledge and shifted attitudes towards the protection of girls from early marriage. The project reached 3,915 primary and secondary beneficiaries, including 10 girls who, having been protected from early marriage, had gone back to school – three of them as a result of timely action taken by police officials trained through the project.  In 2018, the UN Trust Fund supported the work of 19 grantees that helped almost 4,600 women and girls to gain access to specialized support services. Hide

The Azerbaijan Young Lawyers’ Union, supported by the UN Trust Fund, set up a pilot project to provide women with free legal, medical and psychological support services. The project also set up the only shelter for survivors of violence currently operating in the country. The project was in part a response to the 2015 Concluding Observations of the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women which called on Azerbaijan to ensure that women and girl victims of violence have access “to immediate means of redress and protection, including a sufficient number of adequate shelters in all regions”. 


The project managed to provide protection and support to 448 women, almost twice the project target of 220 women. The project boosted the capacities of 10 staff members of the shelter through the series of the training sessions held by recognized international experts. The project also managed to sensitize 2,600 community members and 1,400 men and boys through information sessions on the causes and consequence of gender-based violence. 


Analysis of the available data indicates an increase in knowledge and awareness of the concepts of gender, gender-based violence and available protection mechanisms among community members (87 per cent in community groups and 72 per cent in male groups).

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In Egypt, a project by Al Shehab Institution for Comprehensive Development worked with women and girl survivors of violence, women domestic workers, female sex workers and women living with HIV in two marginalized communities in Cairo. By the end of June 2015, a new drop-in centre had been established providing legal and psychological services. Between April and June 2015, the programme touched the lives of some 111 women and girl survivors of violence and 231 female domestic workers, sex workers and women living with HIV/AIDS in the targeted communities.

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The UN Trust Fund on EVAW-funded joint programme ‘Multi-Sectoral Gender Based Violence Response at the District Level in Nepal’, the first UN joint programming initiative to address VAW in Nepal, was completed in 2013 and the evaluation concluded that the programme has helped create a forum for different stakeholders to address VAW collectively. Hide

Under the UN Trust Fund to End Violence against Women (UN Trust Fund-EVAW), UN Women was supporting activities to monitor cases of sexual and gender-based violence committed under the Khmer Rouge regime, as well as to build safe working conditions for women workers. Hide