One in five women is estimated to be living with a disability, making it crucial to study the increased risks of various forms of violence that they face.  

This synthesis review contains key insights and lessons from the experiences of 22 diverse civil society and women’s rights organizations in various contexts that were supported by the UN Trust Fund to End Violence against Women (UN Trust Fund) special window to end violence against women and girls with disabilities between 2018 and 2023. In particular, it highlights the lessons learned about fostering collaboration, shifting mindsets, empowering women and girls with disabilities, engaging with legal and policy systems, and allowing for flexible adaptation and learning in addressing violence against women and girls with disabilities.  

These findings mean that the review: 

• contributes to developing programming that is disability specific and disability inclusive; 
• promotes the development of a knowledge base that is grounded in the realities of practitioners in the Global South; and 
• offers practical recommendations to practitioners, researchers, donors and policymakers. 

UN Women is fully committed to mainstreaming disability inclusion and intersectionality throughout its work, as laid out in the UN Women Strategic Plan 2022–2025. The goal is to ensure a more systematic approach to ensuring the rights of women and girls with disabilities across UN Women’s areas of work.

Disability, gender, and discrimination are closely interlinked, with one in five women experiencing a disability-related exclusion. To address this, UN Women developed a corporate strategy for the empowerment of women and girls with disabilities built on a multi-pronged approach that includes providing normative guidance, integrated policy advice, operational support, and technical assistance for programme and capacity-development. The approach helps ensure that initiatives are both gender-responsive and inclusive of the rights of persons with disabilities.

This brief overviews UN Women’s approach to disability inclusion and intersectionality.

The latest UN system-wide achievements on gender equality and empowerment of women, collected via the 2022 UN-SWAP reporting. A total of 41 useful data points on the number and name of entities per detailed achievements, across 17 business functional indicator areas. 

A quick overview of UN-SWAP accountablity framework, with its history, milestone events, key resources generated and key results achieved since 2012.

The meta-analysis consisted of a sample of 24 evaluations purposively selected from a population of 330 evaluations on the UNEG website found after a search for the keyword “gender”. The sampling frame was a mix of the main types of gender-related evaluations on gender strategies, policies and programmes implemented in the period from 2017 to 2022 with a main focus on results. The sample is representative of the different types of entities reporting to the UN-SWAP, and the analysis is divided into two parts: the focus and the quality of the evaluation; the evaluation results.

Are you planning an event and want to ensure it is accessible for all, including persons with disabilities but are unsure about the basic event accessibility guidelines? This document is for you!

Since 15 per cent of the world’s population experience one or another form of disability, ensuring physical and information accessibility is a prerequisite for their effective and meaningful participation in any public event. Everyone who arrives at your event should feel welcome and be able to participate and benefit from the event equally. This document provides guidelines on basic accessibility requirements to help you plan a more inclusive and accessible event.

This is a presentation on the GEM and financial targets in the UN System as part of the ITC-ILO Course  “Gender Responsive Budgeting within Organizations”, made by UN Women in December 2022. The aim of the presentation was to inform participants about the use of the GEM and financial targets as UN tools for ensuring gender equality and the empowerment of women at entity and country levels and at pooled funds. 

This brief analyzes legal and policy data from 190 economies on the rights of women with disabilities and highlights promising practices where laws directly recognize and protect these needs, with the goal of informing policy reforms across the globe.

Check the programme of the 2022 UN-SWAP Annual Conference, 8am-12pm EDT, November 15-17.

UN-SWAP 2.0 Technical guidance that guides reporting and is updated with references and good practices annually.

Empowered by the UN-SWAP 2.0, UN Women is able to identify and coordinate the system-wide adoption of good practices and harmonized products that can be scaled from one entity to another. UN Women selects and publishes a series of good practices from various entities on annual basis, normally through the UN-SWAP review reports and the updated technical guidance. This catalog aggregates various best practices under UN-SWAP 2.0 indicators, updated in 2022.

This brief presents data on the legal barriers that women with disabilities face when accessing economic opportunities in 190 economies. The new data suggest that only one-quarter of economies worldwide explicitly protect and promote the rights of women with disabilities.
 

This brief seeks to explain the status of the implementation of the Gender Equality Marker (GEM) in the UN system (at the entity level, UN Country Team level, and in the inter-agency pooled funds level).

The current study is a part of the 2019-2021 Mapping and Costing Studies of Gender Equality Architecture - the existing arrangements and resources within UN entities to implement the gender mainstreaming function in the UN system. This results has been enormously revealing, including the implications of expanding gender remits, the emerging discussion on gender staffing standards, and the harmonized implementation of the gender equality marker and financial targets allowing for better understanding of investments on gender equality. 

This is the powerpoint presentation of the 2019-2021 Mapping and Costing Studies of Gender Equality Architecture - the existing arrangements and resources within UN entities to implement the gender mainstreaming function in the UN system. The results have been enormously revealing, including the implications of expanding gender remits, the emerging discussion on gender staffing standards, and the harmonized implementation of the gender equality marker and financial targets allowing for better understanding of investments on gender equality. 
 

Disability-inclusive communications will help to fulfill the promise of ‘leaving no one behind’, a key component of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Inclusive communications allow persons with disabilities to participate fully and equally in all spheres of society.

The purpose of the Guidelines is to assist UN communications focal points and other UN staff to make all our communications disabilityinclusive and accessible. Inclusive and accessible communications reduce bias and discrimination, and promote inclusion and participation.

The Toolkit aims to help both organizations and individual practitioners and experts to address intersectionality in policies and programmes.

The brief highlights UN Women’s research on disability inclusion markers alongside insights from a wide range of development partners.

The study presents knowledge on the different forms of violence, its underlying causes, and the ability to access services as well as the experiences of women with disabilities in Egypt, focusing on the intersectionality between gender, disability and poverty.

By focusing on the intersection of gender, age, and disability, this brief seeks to raise awareness regarding the situation of older women with disabilities and provides a set of recommendations for actions that stakeholders might consider and implement.