UN Women - institutional support 2024 to 2026

This grant represents Canada’s long-term institutional support to the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women (UN Women). UN Women uses these funds and other donors’ funding to achieve its mandate. Its mandate is to create gender equality policies help countries implement them and coordinate United Nations efforts to promote women's rights. Guided by its 2022 to 2025 Strategic Plan UN Women focuses its programming and advocacy on achieving gender equality and empowering women and girls. It tackles the main causes of inequality in 4 key areas: involving women in government and public life helping women achieve economic independence stopping violence against women and girls and supporting women in peacebuilding humanitarian efforts and disaster response. Project activities include: (1) helping create and implement gender equality policies; (2) training government staff and institutions to support women's rights; (3) providing resources to prevent violence against women and girls; (4) supporting women's economic empowerment through mentorship and access to financial resources; and (5) partnering with various sectors to ensure women can participate in peacebuilding and humanitarian efforts. These sectors include government education healthcare finance and NGOs all working together to promote gender equality and empower women and girls.

The expected outcomes as stated by UN Women include: (1) strengthened global norms and standards on gender equality and women’s empowerment and created more gender-responsive laws policies and institutions; (2) increased public and private financing policies strategies and instruments to advance gender equality; (3) supported societies and communities to adopt attitudes and practices that advance gender equality and women’s empowerment including engaging men and boys; (4) created access to better and more tailored public goods services and resources for all women and girls; (5) ensured that more women and girls exercise their voice agency and leadership; (6) generated better knowledge and data including more global statistics disaggregated by sex to inform gender equality strategies; and (7) championed a more coordinated UN system united in advancing gender equality.