UN Women Private Sector Accountability Framework (UNW-PSAF)
This is a provisional version of a Private Sector Partner Self-Assessment Tool for Gender Equality and Empowerment of Women. The framework may be subject to change upon further consultations with UN and other partners
UN Women works with its private sector partners to promote gender equality and the empowerment of women. To support this work, it has identified the need to create a self-assessment tool inspired by the UN System Wide Action Plan (UN-SWAP) accountability framework for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women, and aligned to the UN Women’s Empowerment Principles (WEPs).
To this end, UN Women has developed a provisional tool, the UN Women Private Sector Accountability Framework (UNW-PSAF). Its objective is to encourage and aidprivate sector partners to:
- benchmark their own performance over time
- locate and systematically monitor their progress in implementing gender equality considerations into their business, and
- highlight their strengths and potential areas for improvement.
The UNW-PSAF uses the UN-SWAP methodology, and identifies a set of common performance standards or indicators for each of the seven WEPs to which companies can adhere and aspire. The seven WEPs provide a basis against which UN Women private sector partners can evaluate their gender-related performance and, together with the methodology of the UN-SWAP, constitute the starting point for the development of this tool.
On average, the tool incorporates five to seven indicators, presented in the form of questions, per WEP. The tool uses the UN-SWAP's progressive rating system which measures performance on the given indicator through five ratings of “not applicable”, “missing”, “approaches requirements”, “meets requirements”, and “exceeds requirements".
UN Women hopes the UNW-PSAF will facilitate and accelerate the mainstreaming of gender equality considerations into the work of private sector partners.
