Evaluation Consultant

Background/Context

UN Women, grounded in the vision of equality enshrined in the Charter of the United Nations, works for the elimination of discrimination against women and girls; the empowerment of women; and the achievement of equality between women and men as partners and beneficiaries of development, human rights, humanitarian action and peace and security.

UN Women, grounded in the vision of equality enshrined in the Charter of the United Nations, works for the elimination of discrimination against women and girls; the empowerment of women; and the achievement of equality between women and men as partners and beneficiaries of development, human rights, humanitarian action and peace and security.

The Ending Violence against Women (EVAW) Section, part of the Programme, Policy and Intergovernmental Division (PPID) at UN Women, provides knowledge-based policy and programming guidance to a diverse array of stakeholders at international, regional and country levels. The Section provides substantive support to intergovernmental processes and leads global and regional initiatives to address violence against women and girls (VAWG), often partnering with other UN agencies and stakeholders, and is responsible for developing and managing several global and regional programmes to address VAWG.

Violence against women and girls (VAWG) is one of the most serious and universal human rights violations. Nearly thirty years after the Beijing Platform for Action, and despite unprecedented momentum and commitments to eliminate VAWG, its prevalence has remained persistent. Global emergencies, crises and conflict have further intensified the drivers and risk factors of VAWG, and digitalization has exacerbated existing forms of violence and led to the proliferation of new forms.

At the same time, the rise in anti-rights movements, shrinking civil society space and backlash against women’s rights are undermining efforts to prevent VAWG and leading to a rise in attacks against women human rights defenders. Despite these worrying trends, evidence demonstrates that the presence of a strong and autonomous feminist movement is the single most critical factor in driving policy change to end violence against women and girls.

In this context, the European Union and UN Women have partnered to deliver the Advocacy, Coalition Building and Transformative Feminist Action (ACT) to End Violence Against Women Programme - a joint commitment between the European Commission and UN Women as co-leaders of the Action Coalition on Gender-Based Violence (GBV). The ACT Programme is focused on strengthening global and regional advocacy, coalition building and transformative feminist action to end violence against women (EVAW).

It is implemented over three years in two regions - Africa and Latin America - with a global component to accelerate impact and position the priorities of women’s rights movements in global fora. It builds on the EU-UN Spotlight Initiative’s results and lessons learned to strengthen women’s rights movements at the regional and global levels and to elevate women’s rights advocacy priorities in regional and global policy making and intergovernmental fora.

The Programme’s overall objective is to accelerate efforts to eliminate all forms of violence against women, through two overarching objectives:

• To strengthen coalition building, networking, leadership, and resilience of global and regional feminist women’s rights movements; and
• To increase and enhance advocacy, campaigning and policy making on EVAW through multistakeholder partnerships and coalitions.

ACT achieves its results through direct investments in global and regional feminist women’s rights organizations to strengthen their institutional capacities, resilience, coalition building, networking and leadership. ImportantlyACT does not primarily provide grants to CSOs for their own capacity strengthening; rather, it engages programme partners identified as already having stronger capacities in advocacy, coalition building and movement strengthening to, in turn, engage and support a broader range of CSOs and women’s rights organizations…