Enhanced coordination, coherence and accountability of the UN system for commitments to gender equality and women’s empowerment.
The United Nations Sustainable Development Cooperation Framework (UNSDCF) 2023-2027 for Sri Lanka includes a dedicated outcome on gender equality and women's empowerment (GEWE). This is due to UN Women's strong advocacy for its inclusion, building and leveraging inter-agency consensus to ensure its retention throughout the UNSDCF development process. Furthermore, agencies recognise the importance of strengthened coordination on GEWE as evidenced by their agreement to finance a dedicated Coordinator for the UN Gender Theme Group (GTG), who can provide technical advice to agencies as required. This position is currently under recruitment, with UN Women's support in contracting and providing supervision for this position. With UN Women's support, the GTG continues to monitor its commitments agreed to by the United Nations Country Team (UNCT) under the Gender Scorecard Action Plan.
Increased engagement of partners in support of UN Women's mandate
Partners (such as development partners, philanthropical foundations, and other organisations interested in joint intiatives) continue to increasingly reach out to UN Women on collaborations in 2022 on programming, advocacy, and policy in furtherance of UN Women's mandate. This is largely due to the increased visibility of UN Women's work through various advocacy and communication campaigns conducted as well as partnership building. Evidence of this is seen in UN Women's national media campaign on WPS reaching an audience of 1.4 million, against an initial target of 50,000, and being approached by the EU on consecutive occasions on advocacy related initiatives, which have the potential to lead to future partnerships.
High quality of programmes through knowledge, innovation, results-based management and evaluation
The office's commitment to high-quality programming over the years is evidenced by independent reviews/evaluations confirming the effectiveness of various programming models developed by the office - in particular, the women's entrepreneurship and economic empowerment model and the multi-party and multi-stakeholder dialogues (MPDs) on peacebuilding and collective leadership. While evaluation for the latest MPDs is ongoing, the evaluation of the women's economic empowerment model employed in 2022 showed that 96% of respondents have strengthened their resilience and livelihoods through UN Women's programming. The office is poised to scale and up and expand on these innovative models which have provided a wealth of information and lessons learnt for future programming not only in Sri Lanka but in other contexts as well.