UNIFEM’s Strategy
To advance UNIFEM’s work on the elimination of violence against women and accelerate progress in implementation and upscaling, the organization’s vision and future directions are set out in A Life Free of Violence: Unleashing the Power of Women’s Empowerment and Gender Equality: Strategy 2008–2013.
The document looks at seminal reports, worldwide initiatives, and expert consensus and emerging issues in academic, advocacy and policy circles. It also provides an overview of UNIFEM-supported programming, work in progress at other UN agencies in the context of UN reform, and other opportunities available to accelerate progress, such as the UN Secretary-General’s multi-year campaign UNiTE to End Violence against Women.
The strategy on ending violence against women focuses on four priority areas and six cross-cutting strategies that hold promise for intensifying implementation and achieving medium- to longer-term results. Under the overall theme of ending impunity and strengthening accountability, the strategy’s four pillars centre around:
- furthering implementation of existing commitments and promoting upscaling;
- aligning informal and formal justice systems with international human rights standards;
- addressing rape as a tactic of warfare in conflict and post-conflict situations; and
- targeting primary prevention with key groups, especially men and young people.
The inter-related cross-cutting strategies central to implementation are:
- sustaining and developing partnerships;
- capacity development at global, regional and national levels;
- strengthened monitoring and evaluation for learning, tracking progress and results-based reporting;
- knowledge-sharing and knowledge generation for UNIFEM to more effectively serve its function as provider of a much-needed “public good” in terms of know-how on the state-of-the-art for programmers;
- advocacy and communications to “change hearts and minds,” sustain public and policy attention on the issue, and promote implementation and accountability; and
- enhanced resource mobilization to support ongoing, catalytic and innovative areas of work — including to reach the target set in the UN Secretary-General‘s Campaign Framework of US$100 million annually for the UN Trust Fund by 2015.
