UN Women partnered with the Inter-Parliamentary Union to prepare a handbook on gender-responsive law-making. This handbook aims to serve as a resource for lawmakers from around the world for designing gender-responsive laws. Such law-making should address the strategic needs of women and girls and must encompass enacting new laws and amending or repealing laws which are outdated, inconsistent with constitutions, or discriminate against them.

This edition of the “UN Women impact stories” series includes stories of UN Women’s selected programmes to end violence against women and girls across the world, highlighting the impact of our work and the partnerships that make it possible.

Globally, more than 2.5 billion women and girls are affected by discriminatory laws and the lack of legal protections. This policy strategy seeks to fast track the repeal of discriminatory laws in 100 countries between 2019 and 2023, focusing on six thematic areas, and will address the legal needs of more than 50 million women and girls.

This paper aims to give a broad overview of marriage and relationship recognition by exploring the extent to which the legal institution of marriage in western jurisdictions has changed to reflect gender equality. It draws on key illustrative examples, including the gendered division of labour, division of assets on divorce, the introduction of same-sex marriage, as well as examples from the expanding “menu” of relationship recognition.

TRANSFORM Issue no. 12 focuses on UN Women’s contribution to women’s political participation and leadership from 2011 to 2017. It summarizes learning from past practices that can inform and strengthen future work in this area. It also addresses UN Women’s strategic niche in promoting women’s political participation and leadership in the context of the UN Secretary-General’s call for the United Nations Development System reform to deliver on the 2030 Agenda.

Access to justice is critical for the effective implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. “A practitioner’s toolkit on women’s access to justice programming” was developed by UN Women, UNDP, UNODC and OHCHR to stimulate bolder gender-responsive justice interventions. It harnesses experiences, lessons learned, and promising practices for creating non-discriminatory and inclusive justice systems, empowering women and girls to claim and fully realize their rights.

The purpose of the corporate evaluation was to assess UN Women’s contribution from 2011 to 2017 towards women’s ability to “lead and participate in decision-making at all levels”, and to provide evidence from past practice to inform its future strategic planning and implementation in this area. It analysed UN Women’s contribution across its integrated mandate at the global, regional, and country levels against four criteria: relevance, effectiveness, efficiency, and sustainability.

This comprehensive gender analysis of Cabo Verde will guide UN Women and the African Development Bank (AfDB) in assisting the Government to integrate and mainstream gender issues to maximize efforts for both gender equality and poverty eradication.

This policy brief outlines the gains and gaps in gender-responsive constitution-making over the years, and the policy lessons that can be drawn from these for ongoing constitutional and post-constitutional reforms.

This brief discusses how migration could be mainstreamed into the Moldovan development framework, particularly from a gender perspective. This requires mainstreaming migration and development issues in every phase of the development planning cycle, including the following six phases: (1) situation analysis, (2) strategic goals and priorities identification, (3) action/programme planning, (4) resource/budget sourcing and planning, (5) implementation, and (6) monitoring and evaluation. Each step provides entry points for migration mainstreaming using a gender lens.

Towards a logical framework methodology with a gender perspective contains the main elements for mainstreaming gender in planning the public budget in Mexico, explains its application step by step, and also includes an example of a problem tree and logical framework matrix with a gender perspective.

This booklet presents the cases of Australia, South Africa, Ecuador, Italy, Morocco, Nepal and the earmarking of resources in Mexico, and focuses on successful tools to accelerate progress towards gender equality.

Conceptual references for gender-responsive budgeting explains basic concepts such as gender, public budget, gender, gender equality, gender-responsive budgeting. It also details the lines of action and regulatory framework in Mexico at the federal level in this area.

The publication is an introduction to the process of mainstreaming gender in public budgeting and synthesizes the Mexican experience, from signing international human rights treaties to actions at federal and state levels in harmonizing gender-responsive laws, policies and budgets.

Handbook for National Action Plans on Violence against Women