This report summarizes the Global Annual Gender Focal Point Meeting held on 18–20 October 2021. Gender Focal Points met to exchange good practices and were provided with capacity building and training, tools and knowledge exchange, and opportunities to learn from leaders and experts from the UN system, civil society, and academia on how to drive change across the UN system.

The 2020 gender accountability framework report marks the third monitoring cycle of the Inter-Agency Standing Committee (IASC)’s 2017 gender policy. It provides a snapshot of the IASC’s output in the calendar year 2020 and allows for cross comparison with the baseline established with the 2018 report.

This brief analyses the extent to and ways in which countries in sub-Saharan Africa have made extensive use of social protection instruments to confront the economic and social fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing on a unique data set of national social protection strategies from 30 countries in the region, it finds that while a significant number of strategies acknowledge gendered risks and vulnerabilities, few include specific actions to address them. The brief concludes with a set of recommendations.

In the first “gender alert” since the Taliban took over Kabul on 15 August 2021, UN Women brings gender data and analyses on the impact of the rapidly evolving context on women’s rights in Afghanistan.

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the strategic needs of women and girls and must encompass enacting new laws and amending or repealing laws which are outdated, inconsistent with constitutions, or discriminate against them.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 report asks what needs to change in the approach of the United Nations system as a whole to make significant practical progress on gender equality in disaster risk reduction by 2030. It asks how the United Nations system, and each individual entity, can better support Member States to empower women and promote women’s leadership in disaster and climate risk governance to underpin risk-informed sustainable development that leaves no one behind.

This policy brief provides a critical assessment of the “men for gender equality” field, and proposes new directions for programming and policy on men and boys. This includes moving away from a focus on individual men’s identities, attitudes and behaviours, and towards a greater focus on the structures and systems that sustain gender inequalities.

This publication provides practical guidance on how to use sustainable bonds to credibly access financing for projects and strategies that advance gender equality objectives and achieve lasting impact. This guide builds on existing global frameworks and provides illustrate examples of gender-related use of proceeds, key performance indicators, and sustainability performance targets.

This publication summarizes the key challenges women-owned and women-led businesses are facing when competing for public procurement opportunities and presents the main approaches and policies that have made a difference across the globe. Examples from several countries are highlighted, including Dominican Republic, Chile, Colombia, Kenya, South Africa, and United Arab Emirates.

This publication presents an overview of the reflections on the peer-to-peer learning dialogues organized as part of the outreach and knowledge sharing efforts of the Chief Executives Board for Coordination Task Force on Addressing Sexual Harassment within the organizations of the UN system.

The November 2021 edition of the UN Women impact stories sample UN Women's work on ending violence against women and girls globally, together with our partners, in Fiji, Morocco, Haiti, Ukraine, and Rwanda.

Comprehensive sexuality education (CSE) is central to children and young people’s health and well-being, equipping them with the knowledge and skills they need to make healthy, informed, and responsible choices in their lives, including to prevent HIV and promote gender equality. This global status review of the CSE provides an analysis of countries’ progress towards delivering good quality school-based CSE to all learners and maps some forward-looking recommendations to countries.

This report on the proceedings of the global conference “Gender-inclusive peace processes: Strengthening women’s meaningful participation through constituency building” explores current challenges, best practices, and recommendations on how best to leverage the practice of constituency building to further gender-inclusive peace.

This brief primarily focuses on reasonable accommodation and accessibility with the objective to develop a greater understanding of these in institutional contexts, to strengthen organisations and institutions’ internal awareness and capacities, and to promote more detailed attention to accessibility and reasonable accommodation in the intersection with gender.

This publication presents, through case studies, how leading public development banks (PDBs) have committed and are delivering on the gender equality agenda. The analysis covers what it takes to adopt gender-responsive principles, mechanisms, and tools, as well as foster gender mainstreaming approaches in the programming and funding cycles of PDBs. The publication concludes with 10 actions that PDBs can take now to enhance their commitments and practices.

UN Women’s tenth anniversary publication, “A decade of daring”, celebrates the milestones of the organization’s first 10 years.

The impact of gender inequality on the HIV response efforts is widely acknowledged, yet, efforts to rectify this are lagging. UN Women, with the United Nations University International Institute for Global Health, convened an Expert Group Meeting on financing for gender equality in the HIV response and commissioned seven discussion papers to identify existing gaps and map recommendations for action.

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 working paper analyses how women leaders at the national and subnational levels of government managed COVID-19 response and recovery from January 2020 through March 2021. The paper finds that women decision-makers demonstrated effective leadership, rapid response, and implemented socially inclusive policies and provides recommendations on how to ensure women’s participation and contribution to the pandemic response and recovery.

This brief describes the Women’s Resilience to Disasters programme, which proposes a comprehensive package to strengthen the resilience of women and girls with the goal of ensuring that the lives and livelihoods of women and girls are resilient to disasters and threats, contributing to sustainable, secure, and thriving communities.