Outcome IND_O_1

Enhanced coordination, coherence and accountability of the UN system for commitments to gender equality and women’s empowerment.

As the expert agency on Gender Equality and Empowerment of Women, UN Women informed the on-going CCA process in India through national stakeholder consultations on priority issues w.r.t gender equality and role of UN in addressing those in next 5 years. UN Women also informed the internal assessment through two evaluation papers - prepared internal and by an external agency, to underscore the need for more focused and gender-transformative shifts across UN's work in India. Further, UN Women provided hands-on support to the RCO and economist engaged with the CCA process to mainstream gender across the document, with emphasis on parallel focused group on gender equality under the new UNSDCF. Through the UN System Coordination, the GEEW communication during the past year has been strengthened. Examples are the commemoration of the Girl Child in the context of SDG5 (UNICEF, UNFPA, UN Women; October 2021); 16 Days of Activism (lead by UN Women, November-December 2021) and International Women’s Day (UN Women, with sister agencies, March 2021); a 10 day webinar series was held in association with the Ministry of Women and Child Development, Government of India to highlight contributions of women in ICT, women in positions of leadership and politics, to discuss transformative gender budgeting, building young feminist leadership and more. Additionally, the UNCT also participated in creating joint campaigns for International and National Days of relevance like International Day of Rural Women (lead by UNFPA and UN Women, October 2021), International Volunteers Day (to highlight issues of volunteering in person and online during the Covid-19 pandemic for women and girls between. UNICEF, UN Women, June 2021). As the lead of UNSDF Group on Gender Equality and Youth Development, UN Women disseminated Gender and COVID-19 specific gender alerts for the UNCT in India to underscore the disparity in Covid-19 management across sectoral interventions and advocate for engendered response to Building Back Better and Equal. This has led to drawing attention of specific UN agencies in addressing gender barriers to COVID-19 prevention and recovery. For example, the Gender Alert on Vaccination Disparity led to WHO and UNICEF doubling its efforts in reaching out to women and girls for improved information sharing on Vaccination and support in mobilising special drives for them at the local levels.

Enhanced coordination, coherence and accountability of the UN system for commitments to gender equality and women’s empowerment.

The UN System-wide Action Plan (UN-SWAP) on Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women (GEEW) is a comprehensive process that the officer coordinates with support from all agencies. Three UN women staff from India attended a four-day training organized by UN Women ROAP on the Gender SWAP process and successfully coordinated the annual assessment process of the SWAP for UNCT India with inputs from gender focal points and others across agencies. As part of the GEEW agenda, the RCO conducted a session on gender parity and disability inclusion with the Operations management team (OMT), an inter-agency operations group on 3rd Nov 2022 with 24 participants from 12 agencies. UN women staff member conducted the session on gender parity and will be working with individual agencies who need strategies to improve parity in staffing.The OMT has been asked to track gender parity data across agencies. The agencies which have less than 47% will be asked to address their low number in 2023.