What is Gender Coordination and How Does it Contribute to Advancing Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment?
Increasing gender equality and women’s empowerment is everybody’s business: no one organization or entity can do it alone. The scale of the challenge is huge, with women still facing gender gaps in safety, leadership, employment, pay and care responsibilities around the world. Despite the progress made over the decades, there is still much work to be done to meet the globally-agreed targets for gender equality set in Agenda 2030 for Sustainable Development.
Agenda 2030 and the 17 Sustainable Development Goals address gender equality via a twin-track approach, with a dedicated goal at SDG 5: achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls, and integration of gender equality across the other 16 SDGs. Achieving gender equality and women’s empowerment is essential to fulfill all 17 SDGs. Gender equality is thus an accelerator and an integrator of the goals and targets of Agenda 2030.
One of UN Women’s most strategic strengths is its unique gender coordination mandate. UN Women works with partners at country, regional and global levels to ensure that our common work advances gender equality and women’s empowerment. In particular, UN Women ensures that the UN’s development efforts have a gender-equitable impact for women and girls, and men and boys.
UN System-Wide Gender Equality Acceleration Plan
The Secretary-General’s UN System-Wide Gender Equality Acceleration Plan (UNSW-GEAP), launched on 8 March 2024, is a flagship initiative to accelerate progress on gender equality across the UN system. It consists of five bold pillars, each designed to work in concert together to achieve transformative results for gender equality within the United Nations System while ensuring coherence and accountability to better deliver for women and girls.
The Secretary General’s Clarion Call on Gender Equality reaffirms the UN’s commitment to equality and non-discrimination as per the UN charter, urging “all United Nations personnel to stand unwavering and united to uphold a strong policy stance on gender equality everywhere”.
UN Women supports the UN system in the Arab States to implement the UNSW-GEAP through increased capacity and accountability for gender equality results through joint work.
UN Women spearheads the UN gender coordination work at country level through leadership of the UNCT Gender Theme Group. This inter-agency mechanism provides programmatic, technical, and policy advice to the UN Country Team (UNCT), enhancing collective results for gender equality and women’s empowerment. UN Women supports the UNCT to build its capacity to mainstream gender in its joint work, including in the Sustainable Development Cooperation Framework that sets out the expected contributions and results of the UNCT in country-level development, to monitor progress and to report on results achieved. UN Women also leads the Gender Theme Group membership to integrate gender equality in the UNCT’s joint engagement and advocacy with government and civil society partners, in public communications and awareness-raising, and in mobilizing resources for technical assistance.
In exercising this role, UN Women is guided by standards and accountability tools adopted by the United Nations at the global level. The United Nations Country Team System-Wide Action Plan Gender Equality Scorecard (UNCT-SWAP GES)provides a methodology and standard minimum criteria across 15 indicators to assess the UNCT’s performance in mainstreaming gender equality and women’s empowerment through its joint work. UN Women is the global technical lead for this effort, and provides support to UNCTs at country and regional level to complete the initial assessment and subsequent annual reports to track progress.
To meet the minimum performance standards of the UNCT-SWAP GES, UN Women works with its sister agencies in the UNCT to build their capacity to mainstream gender equality across all stages of the programming cycle. This includes strengthening knowledge and skills around gender mainstreaming in planning, monitoring and reporting on results. It also includes training on how to use the global tools effectively, such as the Gender Equality Marker, which allows UNCTs to track the extent to which the investment of resources are expected to impact the structural causes of gender inequalities. This coding system facilitates analysis of UN programming investments and enables the UNCT to track trends over time, identify gender mainstreaming gaps, and strengthen gender mainstreaming in programming.
By implementing its gender coordination mandate, UN Women ensures that the UN development system’s efforts yield equitable benefits for women, girls, men and boys, in line with the global commitments of Agenda 2030 and the 17 SDGs. By leveraging accountability tools and our convening power, UN Women reinforces the UN’s steadfast commitment to gender equality and women’s empowerment that is at the heart of the UN Charter and Agenda 2030. Our coordinated approach not only amplifies our collective impact but also drives the transformative change needed to close the gender gaps.
