About UN Women's financing for gender equality programme
Why gender financing is essential
Our current financial system is failing to meet the needs of our world. Despite a global wealth of USD 454 trillion, resources are not reaching those in most need, particularly women and girls. Shockingly, more than 10 per cent of women globally live on less than USD 2.15 a day.
However, recent trends in sustainable finance are offering new ways of using finance to address social and development challenges, including gender equality. By intentionally aligning sustainable finance initiatives to the Sustainable Development Goals, economic decisions can drive sustainable development and work towards a healthier planet and fairer global community.
UN Women is catalyzing new sources of finance for gender equality and women’s empowerment while leveraging innovative mechanisms and encouraging transparency and accountability in financing flows. Below are some examples of how we are working to transform the global economic ecosystem.
What is UN Women’s role in gender financing?
Convening and partnerships
UN Women is working towards establishing and strengthening strategic partnerships across the financial market ecosystem to influence capital direction and discourse around financing for gender equality. But how does this work in practice? UN Women co-chairs the Finance in Common Coalition on Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment, which brings together more than 90 development banks and partners to share expertise and best practices. Notably, 44 Public Development Banks have joined as new signatories during UN Women’s time as Co-Chair. UN Women also collaborates with the Luxembourg Stock Exchange to define and track global issuances of gender bonds.
Market infrastructure and standard setting
UN Women supports the development of gender lens investing principles, standards, and guidelines, to promote the growth of a credible and transparent gender lens investment market. UN Women brings a social and economic justice lens in international market-led initiatives, regulatory and taxonomies development, and push for market participants to raise ambition levels.
Technical assistance and capacity building
UN Women provides tailored policy guidance and technical support to assist stakeholders in effectively allocating and deploying funding for gender equality goals. This involves engaging with government and market practitioners to address policy development and implementation, impact management, and data and research on gender finance. For example, UN Women supported Iceland’s Ministry of Finance to develop a Gender Equality Annex to its Sustainability Finance Framework, paving the way for Iceland to utilize sovereign debt to advance gender equality and potentially issue the first ever sovereign gender bond.
Partner contributions
UN Women is grateful to the Government of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg for its generous contribution to the Sustainable Finance Programme. UN-Women’s work is funded almost entirely through the voluntary support of our partners in government, civil society and the private sector. The government of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg’s contributions enable UN Women to deliver on its mandate to protect the rights of women and girls, to foster an enabling environment where they can thrive alongside men and boys as equals, and to enable opportunities to reach their full potential globally.
