Outcome ZAF_D_6.1

The UN system coherently and systematically contributes to progress on gender equality and the empowerment of women and girls.

In 2025, UN Women co-chairs the UN Gender Theme Group (GTG) in South Africa together with UNFPA, providing strategic leadership for UN system–wide coordination on gender equality and the empowerment of women. Through this mechanism, UN Women drives the mainstreaming of gender across diverse UN agency mandates, ensuring coherence, alignment, and accountability in joint programming, policy engagement, and advocacy with government and other stakeholders. The GTG has been instrumental in advancing gender integration in key processes, including the UNCT-SWAP Gender Equality Scorecard, where it strengthened collective accountability for gender performance, and South Africa’s G20 engagement, where it enabled coordinated UN inputs to elevate gender equality priorities within global economic and development policy discussions.

The UN system coherently and systematically contributes to progress on gender equality and the empowerment of women and girls.

During the year 2024, core resources were invested in implementing the UN Women's coordination mandate through the hiring and onboarding of a Coordination Specialist. UN Women further conducted training of the Eswatini, Namibia and South Africa Gender Theme Group members on gender mainstreaming (including addressing intersectionality) in programs, accelerating accountability on existing gender equality and women’s empowerment frameworks as well as UNCT-SWAP Gender Equality scorecard to improve accountability through tracking and reporting gender responsive indicators in the UNSDCF. SAMCO supports SADC member states in adopting and implementing international standards, such as the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) and the SADC Protocol on Gender and Development. in 2024 UN Women worked with a total of five CSOs in all five supported countries to gear up its programming towards the promotion of positive socialization of women, men, girls and boys within communities and society at large to shift harmful social and gender norms towards a society that is free of VAWG and HIV/AIDS. This is positively contributing to the outcomes of the SADC strategy on GBV and HIV/AIDS and the African Union 2063 Agenda, as well as leveraging the United Nations Regional Strategies and Frameworks for Action to address GBV and HIV/AIDS in joint program interventions.