In 2022 UN Women has managed to expand its project portfolio in most of its areas of work, mobilizing resources with new donors such as the Duchy of Luxembourg for an Economic Empowerment project, SDC for a project to strengthen political participation, and the Office of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs for a violence prevention project.
Relations were also maintained with more traditional donors such as the European Union and the Italian Cooperation Agency for possible follow-up to the Spotlight Initiative and the second phase of the trinational MELYT project.
At the programmatic level, UN Women has diversified its partnerships with the private sector, with grassroots women's organizations and networks, and with key governance actors at the local level, especially the Association of Municipalities of Honduras.
These new partnerships allow UN Women to broaden its scope for intervention.
UN Women has complied at all levels with the requirements with donors, Responsible Parties, personnel, Government, Civil Society, International Cooperation and Private sector. Reporting to donors were presented in a timely manner.
All this actions led by UNWomen were supported in the framework of our mandate (employees/10 and consultants/8 and UNV/1), all of them have been implemented this period with high ethical and leadership standards.
One of the most common modalities requested by donors are Partner Agreements (PAs), this allows UN Women to have action startegic support in the field, strengthening CSOs and Government in the areas of influence of the projects.
How is these organizations strengthened through improvement and innovations initiatives?
Within the framework of the implementation of Partner Agreeemnts, UN Women Honduras compiled formats in editable versions for use by counterparts at the level of procurement processes, recruitment and selection of consultancies, especially finance for these inputs for effective control and monitoring of the resources of the agreement (expenditure controls, bank reconciliations, requests for budget changes), which are socialized in a start-up training with counterparts.
This type of training and templates are applied in several of the CSOs, strengthening their policies and their administrative-financial manuals.
In compliance with the mandatory courses of INFOSECURITY, ANTI-FRAUD and PSEA, the capacities of the programmatic and administrative staff of the PAs are strengthened, and organizations that do not have a policy based on preventing labor and sexual harassment, are supported to generate these manuals, oriented to those of UN.
UN Women Honduras has a file structure, which are standard for OEEF and DRF that allow information from the Donor Agreement, when a project starts, monitoring reports, procurement processes, payment processes, budget reviews, signed PAs and their respective follow-up support documents, project evaluations, policies and procedures updated, etc. All this within the reach of all office staff, avoiding loss of information when colleagues leave the organization, lack of tracking of a file when someone on the team is Annual Leave or Sick Leave, as well as having inputs on hand for internal reports, audits inputs, or simply maintaining a historical memory in a systematic order.
The Honduras Office receives policy updates in all areas such as asset, Finance, Procurement, partner agreements, travel, etc. and tries and frames its actions in compliance with these, in these there is no room for innovation since they are instructed by HQ and RO.
Nurturing a diverse and empowered workforce and advancing an inclusive UN-Women culture
UNWOMEN Honduras´s team is 100% committed to the values of the agency, with one vision: Achieve the mandate of the agency: ending violence against women and empowering them economically an politically, constructing peace societies for women and empowering those at the center of the spaces in which we have incidence.
The office has an inclusive culture within it´s team, with stakeholders and beneficiaries, this is strengthened with training processes and internal dynamics, that allow to encourage and develop this sensibilities. 100% of the staff and consultants has an awareness of the responsibility to represent UN/UNWomen in any space.
Our inclusive culture includes to encourage women and people with disabilities to apply in the vacancies. The atmosphere of the office is so respectful of race, believes and sexuality, no body is been judged, the tolerance is a one of the biggest values in our team.
Effective normative, operational and coordination products, services and processes
UNWomen harmonizes their projects with the common programmatic goals, aligned with the Strategic Plan of the agency, this result in strategic partnership, for example supporting women to end violence cycles and empowering them with economic autonomy.
As UNS, has a good coordination with the agencies which work in the framework of Joint Programs:
o The Spotlight Initiative with UNDP, UNICEF and UNFPA;
o Two PBF-funded projects: one with OHCHR and UNDP and the other with UNHCR and TROCAIRE.
OMT is one space to work SMART, projecting UN in the mandate “delivery as one” being effective reducing process, taking advance to do procurement processes jointly and have scale economies.
Dynamics to work in partnership with international cooperation to make events of high impact, catching different targets of audiences with a reduced investment.