United Nations-Wide Funding Framework for Women’s Organizations and Civil Society Organizations

Women’s organizations (WOs) and civil society organizations (CSOs) are essential to advancing gender equality, sustaining feminist movements, responding to crises, and defending women’s rights amid growing backlash and shrinking civic space. Yet the funding they receive is often short-term, restrictive, unpredictable and administratively burdensome. 

In 2024, the UN Trust Fund to End Violence against Women and Girls and Spotlight Initiative launched an inter-agency Task Force, bringing together 11 UN entities*, to advance more coherent, simplified, and harmonized funding approaches for WOs and CSOs across the UN System. 

Drawing on its Preliminary Analysis of UN System Funding Approaches and feedback from diverse stakeholders, the Task Force developed a UN-wide Funding Framework for WOs and CSOs (the Framework) as a practical roadmap for translating existing commitments into action. At the UN80 milestone, the Framework reflects the UN 2.0 vision of a more agile, networked, and trusted institution. It responds directly to the Secretary-General’s Gender Equality Acceleration Plan Clarion Call and has been recognized as a promising practice in the 2025 and 2026 GEAP Progress Reports. 

Centered around six principles, the Framework recommends concrete operational shifts to deliver financing that is accessible, predictable, and transformative: 

1. Prioritize women’s organizations, especially those led and serving marginalized constituencies.
2. Reduce administrative burdens to enable equitable access. 
3. Leverage the UN’s convening and norm-setting power to strengthen feminist funding ecosystems. 
4. Provide core, flexible and long-term funding that sustains women organizations-led solutions 
5. Reframe and share risk across the system, avoiding its transfer to local partners 
6. Shift power and ensure mutual accountability through participatory governance and feminist monitoring, evaluation and learning 

 The Framework is a living document to be piloted across the UN System and refined over time, with a view to eventual formal endorsement and system-wide adoption. 

Read the full framework above, or download the summary. 

 *UN Trust Fund to End Violence against Women and Girls; Spotlight Initiative; UNDP; OCHA; UNHCR; IOM; UNDCO; UNFPA; UNICEF; Women’s Peace and Humanitarian Fund; UN Women