Women’s economic empowerment is critical for sustainable peace and development in Libya. This study focuses on women’s empowerment in the economic track of Libya’s peace process. It considers the benefits of gender-mainstreaming and the normative framework that supports gender equality, including UN Security Council resolutions in relation to Libya and the Women, Peace and Security agenda, the peacebuilding framework for Libya and international human rights law.

This report on the proceedings of the global conference “Gender-inclusive peace processes: Strengthening women’s meaningful participation through constituency building” explores current challenges, best practices, and recommendations on how best to leverage the practice of constituency building to further gender-inclusive peace.

This newsletter captures the latest updates on the implementation of the Women’s Peace and Humanitarian Fund (WPHF) in Lebanon. The newsletter includes the key highlights and achievements of the WPHF programme partners' towards enhancing women’s participation in the Beirut Port Explosion’s response and recovery process.

UN Women and OCHA jointly examine the extent to which issues of gender equality were factored into various stages of the 2020 Flash Appeal in response to the Beirut port explosions.

The paper considers the under-representation of women in high-level mediation and peacemaking positions. Set in the context of successive normative commitments to increase the representation of women in high-level mediation, the paper considers why peace process mediation appears to be an outlier in the general trend towards gender parity in UN senior posts in particular.

This report on the proceedings of the 2018 conference “Women’s meaningful participation in peace processes: Modalities and strategies across tracks”, explores innovations, trends, and challenges in the interplay between official, high-level processes and unofficial processes in which civil society plays a leadership role.

This report presents the results of the independent evaluation of UN Women’s ‘Strengthening the Resilience of Syrian Women and Girls and Host Communities’ (“Madad”) programme and offers lessons and recommendations for future programming on gender equality and women’s empowerment. The Synthesis report includes country specific annexes for Iraq, Jordan and Turkey.

This guidance note seeks to assist policy and programme actors to conduct rapid assessments that are fully responsive to gender and intersectionality. It is focused on three critical steps: the development of assessment surveys/questionnaires, their implementation, the analysis of findings and resulting recommendations.

This document outlines UN Women’s response plan for the 2020 Beirut Plan – a plan that works across the humanitarian-development-peace and security nexus to provide immediate relief to those in need, and to ensure that longer term recovery and reconstruction both addresses the needs of women and girls, and promotes gender equality.

This brief addresses the importance of women’s full, equal, and meaningful participation to an effective pandemic response and to peacemaking efforts, and how the women, peace and security agenda can provide a critical framework for inclusive decision-making and sustainable solutions. It also provides preliminary analysis of the impact of COVID-19 on women’s participation in ceasefires and peace processes and offers a series of recommendations, including on “building back better”.

Crisis management or emergency situations such as COVID-19 can have serious impacts on the lives of women and girls, if gender dimensions are not considered. Issues such as care work, economic autonomy, physical or sexual violence, women's participation in decision-making, disaggregation of data by sex, gender analysis, and irregular migration are just some of the areas of concern that must be part of an effective response to the health crisis that the world is going through right now.

UN Women’s Regional Office for the Arab States, in collaboration with UN Women Country Offices in Iraq, Libya, and Yemen, organized a two-day meeting Women and Young People in Peace Processes: Synergies and Cross-learning, funded by the Government of Germany. The meeting was held in Beirut, Lebanon and sought to provide a space for inter-generational dialogue between women and young people from countries affected by the conflict in the MENA region, to exchange strategies that have been utilized to mitigate conflict, to broker dialogue and influence track 1 peace processes in the region. Through this exchange and dialogue, the meeting sought to identify opportunities for strategic alliances and to define common demands.

Humanitarian needs continue to grow with nearly 132 million people in need of assistance in 2018, due to conflict, persecution, and natural disasters. The average humanitarian crisis now lasts more than nine years, and periods of forced displacement more than seventeen. Women and girls who make up approximately half of this 132 million face daily discrimination and violence. The breakdown of protection mechanisms and destruction of essential services and economic structures in crises hits the already marginalized hardest.

Around the world, young women are working to prevent violent conflict, recover from crises, and build peaceful, tolerant communities, yet most peace and security interventions are blind to the needs and contributions of young women. This paper examines the diverse roles that young women play in these contexts and offers recommendations for ensuring their meaningful inclusion and participation in building and sustaining peace.