UN Women’s work on women’s economic empowerment has a broad and ambitious mandate and aims to strengthen women’s economic rights and respond to pressing global needs. This independent corporate thematic evaluation was undertaken to assess the relevance, effectiveness, coherence, efficiency, and sustainability of UN Women’s contributions to women’s economic empowerment by advancing gender responsive laws, frameworks, policies, and partnerships, and proposes recommendations and insights to strengthen this area of work.

This brochure captures the underlying features and best practices of UN Women’s Second Chance Education (SCE) programme. This illustrative brochure captures some of the broad transformative approaches, including support to address gender-based barriers, gender-transformative life skills, SCE learning pathways, advocacy and policy work, personalized support, and e-learning. Specific scenarios from different SCE programme geographies are also discussed in the brochure.

This publication is an account of the experiences of implementing UN Women’s Second Chance Education (SCE) programme in the six countries in which it was piloted: Australia, Cameroon, Chile, India, Jordan, and Mexico. It provides extensive examples of the ways that implementing partners have designed and delivered the components of the programme in different contexts, along with thoughts from staff, volunteers, and participants.

This handbook provides an overview of the characteristics of the Second Chance Education (SCE) hubs: physical spaces where women who are part of the SCE Programme participate in in-person learning activities. This publication is underpinned by a series of virtual hub tours that provide a glimpse into the way partners have been carrying out the programme across six different countries.

Drawing on the experiences of UN Women’s Second Chance Education (SCE) programme, this guide offers practical guidance on implementing a gender-transformative second chance education programme for women. It describes SCE’s signature features and gives examples of how they have been implemented in the different contexts of the six pilot SCE countries of Australia, Cameroon, Chile, India, Jordan, and Mexico.

These recommendations are the first of their kind and underline the critical role migrant women human rights defenders play in securing the rights of people on the move. Migrant women human rights defenders include women, girls, and gender-diverse persons of all ages who promote and protect the human rights of people on the move, whether they are migrants themselves or not, irrespective of whether they self-identify as a woman human rights defenders.

This policy paper explores the multiple and intersecting forms of discrimination faced by racially marginalized women, rooted in systemic racism, sexism, and other systems of inequality. It offers recommendations to States, international actors, and civil society organizations on ways to implement urgent reforms to improve access to services and human rights protections for women who are marginalized based upon their race, gender, and migration status.

This policy brief explores the ways in which being a migrant accentuates the risks of women and girls to various forms of gender-based violence at all stages of migration and examines how this has been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. The brief concludes with a set of recommendations on how to reduce the risks of gender-based violence and improve the provision and coordination of essential services for women and girls.

This paper uses harmonized collections of national labor force datasets to compare the size and shape of the paid care sector around the globe. The paper then explores the relationship between the size of the care sector and various measures of need for care, finding very little evidence of relationship. Finally, the paper explores wages and working conditions for paid care workers in a subset of countries for which data is available.

Supported by photos, data, infographics, and individual impact stories, the annual report highlights key achievements of the 18 active projects in 2019. It offers a snapshot of the impact the global pandemic caused by COVID-19 on grantees and the populations they serve, and the ways they are responding to it. Finally, it presents the results from its latest efforts to accelerate progress by fostering innovation and peer learning.

Analysing data from 11 national household surveys, this research found that, while women typically earn less than men and pay more in transfer fees, the average remittance amounts they send are the same as or even greater than those of men, implying that they tend to remit a larger portion of their earnings than do men. The research also showed that migrant women are more dependent on in-person cash transfer services to send remittances.

This guidance note highlights the emerging impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on women migrant workers, focusing on the key challenges and risks they face. It makes recommendations in the context of the economic and social response and recovery packages that governments are putting forward, supported by examples of existing good practices from around the world.

Social protection is a universal human right and a key element of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. While this right unequivocally applies to migrants, irrespective of migration status, migrant women in particular often remain excluded. Against this backdrop, this policy brief discusses the barriers that migrant women face in accessing social protection and provides recommendations for States to meet their obligation to overcome these, particularly in relation to health care, maternity protection and essential services for victims and survivors of violence.

This paper concerns the implications of migration within Central America for family life. Focusing on the case of Costa Rica and Nicaragua, it shows how Nicaraguan families develop strategies based on a history of informal and flexible caregiving. While these informal strategies allow families to navigate the challenges migration and family separation entail, they also contribute to continued vulnerability and reinforce the gendered burdens of caregiving within transnational families.

Are we on track to achieve gender equality and the empowerment of women and girls? This report brings together the latest available evidence on gender equality across all 17 Sustainable Development Goals, underscoring the progress made as well as the action still needed to accelerate progress.

This report outlines the current context with respect to the problem of violence against women migrant workers. It provides information on the measures taken by Member States and activities undertaken within the UN system to address this issue and ensure the protection of migrant women’s human rights.

Supported by photos, data, infographics, and individual stories of impact, UN Women's Fund for Gender Equality (FGE) annual report presents main aggregated results achieved by its 25 active projects. It highlights the process and outcomes of its fourth grant-making cycle, 2018–2019, a scaling and innovation initiative. The report also features FGE’s South-South and triangular cooperation strategy, a few impact news from past projects, and two grantee partners’ op-eds.

A two-page brief providing an overview of UN Women’s “Policies and practice guide on gender-responsive implementation of the Global Compact for Migration”.

This paper investigates how women’s right to live free from violence operates in the context of insecure immigration status. It identifies a tension between human rights and immigration control that is present in theory, policy frameworks, and migrant women’s lived experiences. It contends that this tension has led to a proliferation of rights’ statuses for migrant women who are exposed to intimate partner violence.

Supported by photographs, data, infographics, and individual stories of impact, the 2017–2018 annual report highlights key aggregated results achieved by the Fund for Gender Equality’s (FGE) 26 active projects. It also presents the main findings and recommendations of the first FGE independent evaluation and introduces its fourth grant-making cycle, 2018–2019, a scaling and innovation initiative.