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UN-Women welcomes the Corporate Evaluation of UN-Women’s UN coordination and broader convening role in Ending Violence Against Women, which sought to analyze the strategic significance, operationalization and results of UN-Women’s UN system coordination and broader convening role on ending violence against women (EVAW) issues, including during the COVID-19 global pandemic. The evaluation also provides useful findings and lessons learned that will feed into corporate programmatic thinking and practice on UN system coordination and broader convening role on EVAW, including in ongoing global EVAW programmes (e.g. the Safe Cities and Safe Public Spaces for Women Global Initiative, the Spotlight Initiative, Joint Global Programmes on Essential Services and VAW Data) and relevant initiatives on prevention, Generation Equality and corresponding Action Coalitions, and will serve as a key input to the development of the next UN- Women Strategic Plan (‘SP’) (2022-2025).
UN-Women acknowledges a key evaluation’s finding, that a large part of coordination in thematic areas takes place within the context of normative work and programming (e.g., joint planning; development and propagation of knowledge products; programme implementation; and advocacy and communications), and that coordination needs to be viewed from the value it adds to normative and programming results and outcomes. UN-Women welcomes the evaluation recommendations on the need for this aspect to be further recognized, resourced, leveraged and strengthened.
UN-Women appreciates the evaluation finding on its strong positioning with external actors at the country level and recognition as the ‘go-to’ agency for EVAW matters. In particular, the evaluation notes the strong technical capacity, including among the EVAW HQ team, and in several field offices, and the Entity’s established on-the-ground networks where strong constituencies have been built with national women’s machinery, government-led coordination structures, civil society organizations (‘CSOs’) and women’s organizations, resulting from long-standing engagements in advocacy for a human rights-based, woman- and survivor-centred and multisectoral approach to EVAW. This has enabled UN-Women to play a lead role in external coordination-- even in countries with small programme portfolios, or where UN-Women does not have a country presence. UN- Women appreciates the evaluation finding on UN-Women’s credentials in a system-wide coordination role on EVAW throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, especially its thought leadership, expeditious mobilization of evidence, and strong and cohesive advocacy for action to respond to and prevent VAWG in public and private spaces.
UN-Women has achieved a number of successful results in leveraging its UN coordination function and collaborative action in support of efforts on EVAW. UN-Women has been able, through several global high impact initiatives (e.g., the Spotlight Initiative, Joint Global Programmes on Essential Services and VAW Data, prevention work, the UN system wide Trust Fund to End Violence against Women) to work through interagency challenges, develop pragmatic interagency arrangements in joint programming, global knowledge products, and strengthen a shared inter-agency understanding of and approach to VAW prevention and responses, advocacy and communications. UN-Women also acknowledges the evaluation finding that interagency dynamics were enhanced through agreed division of roles and responsibilities. UN-Women agrees with the evaluation’s recommendation for the establishment of clear accountability frameworks that better reflect its coordination and convening functions in the UN-Women Strategic Plan 2022-2025, which will amplify UN-Women’s delivery footprint, based on field capacity and resource mobilization targets set out in the next SP.
A clear roadmap for the development of the next SP has been designed, which contains several consultative processes with the Executive Board and other key partners at global, regional and country levels, as well as internally. The initial work on a corporate Theory of Change and Theory of Action aims at sharpening UN-Women’s programmatic focus and addressing cross-cutting issues that can fully integrate our triple mandate and ensure programming impact and effectiveness for delivering high-quality results. UN-Women has established a Working Group as part of the SP development process, including on indicators for inter-agency coordination.
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