The Strategic Plan 2022–2025 will guide UN Women for the next four years—with an eye toward the 2030 deadline to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals. It articulates how UN Women will leverage its unique triple mandate to mobilize urgent and sustained action to achieve gender equality and the empowerment of all women and girls and support the achievement of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

In 2021, the Independent Evaluation Service conducted the corporate evaluation of UN Women’s UN system coordination and broader convening role in ending violence against women (EVAW) as part of its Corporate Evaluation Plan. The evaluation provides an overall assessment of UN Women’s UN system coordination and broader convening role in the area of EVAW and includes a forward-looking analysis with a view to informing UN Women’s Strategic Plan 2022–2025.

UN Women introduced the flagship programme initiatives (FPIs) as a means of consolidating and scaling-up the entity’s programming modalities to be fitter for purpose in the context of the Sustainable Development Goals and United Nations reform. In 2020, the Independent Evaluation Service, in collaboration with the Internal Audit Service, assessed the relevance, effectiveness, efficiency, and coherence of the FPIs and their integration as thematic priorities of the Strategic Plan 2018–2021.

This meta-synthesis brings together evidence from evaluations of UN Women’s organizational effectiveness and efficiency outputs. In addition to highlighting progress, the synthesis captures commonly identified drivers of change in the form of good practices and innovation, as well as impediments.

The Strategic Plan 2018–2021 outlines UN Women’s strategic direction, objectives and approaches to support efforts to achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls. It supports the implementation of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action and contributes to the gender-responsive implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

The country portfolio evaluation guidance has been developed to assess UN Women’s contributions to results at country level while shifting the focus from activities and outputs towards medium/long-term results.

The “UN Women Evaluation Handbook: How to manage gender-responsive evaluation” is a practical handbook to help those initiating, managing and/or using gender-responsive evaluations. Although specific to UN Women evaluation processes, the Evaluation Handbook may be useful to international development evaluators and professionals, particularly those working on gender equality, women's empowerment and human rights.

The 2007-2008 global financial crisis and subsequent austerity policies have jeopardized the realization of women’s economic and social rights. The resulting job losses, decreased social services, and increased economic insecurity have weakened the capacity of people to perform unpaid care work. In this paper, UN Women calls on States to meet their human rights obligations by taking a transformative approach to economic and social policy and designing recovery policies that promote gender equality and women’s rights.