One Mission, An Evolving Model

For 30 years, the UN Trust Fund’s mission has remained constant: to ensure that quality funding and comprehensive support reach those driving change to end violence against women and girls. Its model has not.

We have moved toward quality funding, longer-term, more flexible and increasingly core support, designed around what women’s rights and civil society organizations need to sustain change.

Applications are simpler. Decision-making is closer to the contexts and communities where the work happens. And the solutions, priorities and approaches continue to come from the organizations leading the work.

Accompaniment is built into the partnership, and evidence and learning are part of how the work grows. That gives organizations the space to adapt, test, learn and take what works further.

Financing has become more intentional about who it reaches and what it enables. More resources now flow to women’s rights and locally led organizations, while thematic windows help direct financing and attention to issues and groups that remain persistently underfunded and too often left behind.

The model has never been static. Across five Strategic Plans, the UN Trust Fund has reviewed what was working, listened to women’s and civil society organizations and adapted its approach in response.

Throughout this evolution, one thing has remained constant: the UN Trust Fund’s General Assembly mandate and the accountability that comes with it. Annual reporting to the Commission on the Status of Women and the Human Rights Council anchors locally led action in a global intergovernmental mandate, bringing collective leadership, evidence and lessons into global policy processes and financing commitments to prevent and end violence against women and girls.

Today, it remains the only General Assembly–mandated, system-wide, inter-agency, pooled financing and accountability mechanism dedicated exclusively to ending violence against women and girls.