Management Response

: Regional Office for Asia and the Pacific (Thailand)
: 2023 - 2023 , Regional Office for Asia and the Pacific (Thailand) (RO)
: Joint evaluation of the Regional Project on Enhancing Access to Justice for Women in Asia and the Pacific
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: Regional Office for Asia and the Pacific (Thailand)
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The final evaluation of the "Enhancing Access to Justice" project has been completed over a period of seven months, led by UN Women in partnership with the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) and the International Commission of Jurists (ICJ). The evaluation team engaged in extensive consultations and worked in close collaboration with the Evaluation Management Committee. Given the complexity of the program, which spanned across six countries, involved three agencies, and interacted with numerous government bodies, civil society organizations, and partners, it was a challenging task to encapsulate all outcomes fully. Nevertheless, the evaluation team succeeded in capturing the core essence of the program and highlighting several key achievements. The constructive criticism provided by the evaluation has been duly acknowledged and, where appropriate, deemed justified. These insights will be invaluable for refining and enhancing future programming efforts.
: Draft
Recommendation: UN Women should continue to strengthen its access to justice programming in the region, as well as at the global level. Building on the wealth of knowledge and evidence gained through the regional project, UN Women should utilise its comparative advantage in access to justice programming, in particular by reaching women that others are unable to reach.
Management Response: UN Women's Strategic Plan, particularly under Outcome 1, is dedicated to the "Strengthening of global normative frameworks, and the development of gender-responsive laws, policies, and institutions." Historically, the organization has been committed to advocating for legislative change and the provision of gender-responsive services, particularly for women who have experienced violence. While people-centered justice is not applied across the organization yet, the Access to Justice for Women in the Asia Pacific region project has contributed significantly to promising practices and scalable examples for all of UN Women. Building on the UN's strong focus on the LNOB agenda, UN Women has leveraged it gained knowledge on women with intellectual and psychosocial disabilities and not only transferred knowledge to other agencies for their programming but also to develop joint programming specially on justice for women with disabilities. The achievements and insights gained throughout the execution of the six-year project have been instrumental in shaping country-specific programming and will continue to inform future initiatives in the Pacific. Additionally, the project team has actively facilitated knowledge sharing among UN agencies and international organizations, ensuring a broader impact and integration of learned best practices.
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Description:
Management Response Category: Accepted
Thematic Area: Leadership and political participation (SPs before 2018)
Operating Principles: National ownership, Knowledge management
Organizational Priorities: UN Coordination, Partnership, Normative Support
UNEG Criteria: Effectiveness
Key Actions
Responsible Deadline Status Comments
UN Women has established itself as a key player in ac¬cess to justice programming in the region. It has built momentum as well as a considerable wealth of knowl¬edge around women’s access to justice, which should be capitalised on going forward. UN Women has built the trust and confidence of stakeholders and in partic¬ular of its beneficiaries. Expectations have been raised, which it should aim to meet. In particular, UN Women should utilise its comparative advantages in reaching women that others are unable to reach. Strategic part¬nerships, such as with the current responsible parties, but with more effective partnership management, or with new partners, such as UNDP, should be leveraged to further strengthen UN Women’s access to justice offer going forward. UN Women ROAP UN Women Country Offices 2024/12 Initiated UN Women is advancing it's governance and Rule of Law programming to continue its key role to advance women's access to justice in the Asia-Pacific region. This includes join initiatives with women CSO, disability communities, national and local government actors. In addition UN Women is developing joint programmes sister agencies such as UNDP and OHCHR.
Recommendation: UN Women, ICJ and OHCHR should leverage the 2030 Agenda and the SDGs to further drive progress towards project results and embed the SDGs in results frameworks. Future project should include global SDG 16 indicators into their results frameworks, to explicitly link project contributions to the global Goal.
Management Response: UN Women has strategically leveraged Sustainable Development Goal 16 (SDG 16) in its initiatives, notably through the formulation of the regional Women's Access to Justice strategy. Despite the programming's substantial alignment with SDG objectives, this emphasis was not adequately mirrored in the programme documents and logframe. In concurrence with this observation, UN Women's management has resolved that all future projects formulated under UN Women's Strategic Plan Outcome 1 will explicitly incorporate global goals, including SDG 16. This will be operationalized by aligning SDG 16 indicators with project indicators. It is worth noting, that UN Women has the opportunity to contribute to gender and sex-disaggregated data by also putting a gender lens on SDG indicators to close the data gap that currently exist. Please note that UN Women has developed a progress report on the SDGs with a specific focus on gender and women's rights.
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Description:
Management Response Category: Accepted
Thematic Area: Leadership and political participation (SPs before 2018)
Operating Principles: Knowledge management
Organizational Priorities: Culture of results/RBM
UNEG Criteria: Efficiency, Relevance
Key Actions
Responsible Deadline Status Comments
The evaluation recommends that UN Women, ICJ and OHCHR in any future iteration of the project, increase leverage of the 2030 Agenda and the SDGs to further project results. All countries in the region have signed up to the SDGs and this can be used to drive momen¬tum as well as to strengthen ownership of project activities and commitment towards project results, thereby contributing towards sustainability. The SDGs can also be used to strengthen policy coherence amongst decision-makers. Similarly, mainstreaming the SDGs further can also strengthen CSO capacities for advocacy and report writing. Going forward, it is recommended that UN Women embed the SDGs into any future project’s results framework to be able to fully capture the contribution of the project towards furthering the SDGs and to drive progress. UN Women ROAP UN Women Fiji MCO OHCHR Asia OHCHR Pacific 2024/06 Initiated New projects are currently developed in partnership with UNDP and OHCHR based on International standards including SDG 5 and SDG 16.
Recommendation: All future projects should have a realistic and evidence-based theory of change, which is regularly reviewed and underpinned by informed risks and assumptions. This can be used to develop a corresponding results framework with SMART indicators and a strong M&E framework.
Management Response: After approximately three years of implementation, the programme document did not align with emerging research and the global shift towards access to justice. The UN Women project management team conducted a review and subsequently amended Output 3, obtaining authorization from SIDA to pivot the project's direction. A thorough review of the theory of change, including updates to indicators, proved challenging due to differing perspectives on advancing women's access to justice between ICJ and UN Women. Nevertheless, all involved agencies recognize the significance of this recommendation and concur on the need to enhance the theory of change and indicators in all future programming. Since 2018, UN Women has developed a number of training modules and toolkits to ensure SMART and actionable frameworks.
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Description:
Management Response Category: Accepted
Thematic Area: Leadership and political participation (SPs before 2018)
Operating Principles: Knowledge management
Organizational Priorities: Culture of results/RBM
UNEG Criteria: Efficiency
Key Actions
Responsible Deadline Status Comments
Going into any future iterations of the project, UN Women, ICJ and OHCHR should ensure a strong, evidence-based theory of change closely linked to a corresponding results framework, that will enable them to report against results and contributions towards higher level goals and outcomes. A combination of SMART1 qualitative and quantitative indicators should be developed to capture behavioural and attitudinal change as well as quantitative progress. This should include indicators at the output, outcome and impact level, which will be able to capture all results of the project, including those at the higher level. A greater use of qualitative indicators that measure perceptions and behaviours at the outcome level, as opposed to quantitative indicators that measure activities at the output level, will likely better capture the project’s progress and results, as well as contributions towards the project outcomes and impact. These will also allow for capturing the voices of people, which cannot be captured through quantitative indicators, in particular when measuring change on sensitive issues. The project’s outcomes can be linked to and show a causal pathway between the project’s results and its contribution towards corporate level outcomes as well as regional and donor development priorities and the SDGs. UN Women OHCHR 2024/06 Initiated
Recommendation: Any future iterations of the project should include a workable partnership management, together with an organizational set-up with clearly defined roles and responsibilities that matches the vision of the project. Coordination and communication mechanisms should be formalized to ensure the efficient implementation of the project.
Management Response: The "Access to Justice" project was initially conceptualized as a joint project but was implemented with UN Women as the responsible party, and OHCHR and ICJ as implementing partners. This arrangement placed the entirety of management, financial oversight, coordination, and reporting duties on the UN Women project team. Consequently, ICJ was required to adhere to certain regulations and obligations, established to ensure due diligence and responsible project implementation by the UN. Despite the management role being designated to UN Women, the partnership between ICJ, OHCHR, and UN Women was intended to be of equal standing. This discrepancy led to tensions and discussions, which could have been mitigated by setting more realistic expectations among partners, aligned with UN rules and regulations. The formal agreement between UN Women and ICJ is a Partnership Cooperation Agreement, which requires UN Women to conduct indebt financial monitoring and guidance in regards to project content. However, due to the informally agreed partnership, this was often taken as an intrusion in ICJ's work. Moreover, the project document did not allocate staff and budget for coordination and communication, complicating the establishment of shared goals and advocacy messages. At the request of UN Women, an agreement was reached with Sida to fund an additional P3 staff member to enhance coordination across the agencies, facilitating joint implementation. Mid-project, upon UN Women's initiative, a communications consultant was hired to offer support to all three agencies, significantly improving outreach and advocacy efforts.
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Description:
Management Response Category: Accepted
Thematic Area: Leadership and political participation (SPs before 2018)
Operating Principles: Not applicable
Organizational Priorities: Partnership, UN Coordination
UNEG Criteria: Efficiency, Effectiveness, Coherence
Key Actions
Responsible Deadline Status Comments
The project was constrained by its organizational set-up and the partnership management, which led to confusion regarding the roles and responsibilities of each of the organisations. Any future project should contain an organizational set-up with clearly defined roles and responsibilities for any future iterations of the project, with human resources and allocation of funding matching the implementation realities. The management of partnerships should be a key priority throughout the project design and implementation. Given the challenges of implementing jointly with an International NGO, it is recommended that the partners revert to their previous modality of cooperating through a Memorandum of Understanding. UN Women 2024/11 Initiated It should be noted that a Memorandum of Agreement does not facilitate the transfer of funds and financial management. Sida's requirement for a single funding stream (to UN Women) necessitated the use of a Partnership Cooperation Agreement (PCA), placing the responsibility for financial and narrative reporting on UN Women. Currently, different contractual modalities for international NGOs are not available under the UNDP/UN Women framework, but this should be discussed at a global/HQ level.
Recommendation: It is highly recommended to include some dedicated M&E capacity in any future iteration of the project’s organisational structure, which would strengthen the future project’s M&E approach and allow for more sophisticated data collection, providing a strong evidence base for planning and programming as well as capturing results. Any future project requires standardised mechanisms for learning, which should ensure that all knowledge, evidence and lessons learned gained during the current implementation phase as well as any future project iterations are captured and fully institutionalised. This can be aided by undertaking a broad baseline assessment at the start of any future project.
Management Response: The inception phase of the project included a country assessment to identify entry points for women's access to justice. However, a more thorough baseline, with a greater emphasis on data collection and baseline studies—particularly in areas aimed at enhancing the capacity of justice providers—should have been conducted. At the project's outset, an M&E specialist was partially funded by the project, but this support was subsequently discontinued after the country assessments were finalized.
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Description:
Management Response Category: Accepted
Thematic Area: Leadership and political participation (SPs before 2018)
Operating Principles: Knowledge management
Organizational Priorities: Organizational efficiency
UNEG Criteria: Efficiency
Key Actions
Responsible Deadline Status Comments
It is highly recommended that for any future iteration of the project consideration is given to include some dedicated M&E capacity into the project’s organisa¬tional structure. Different modalities can be considered dependent upon resources, including a dedicated M&E officer at the project level; sharing an M&E officer with other projects; having M&E capacities at the pro-gramme level, which could be utilised on a percentage basis within the project or contracting a consultant to provide M&E support. Other possibilities could be explored including engaging a UN Volunteer (UNV). Many UN projects have had excellent experiences us¬ing this approach, which is highly cost effective, while producing effective results. Standardized and systematic mechanisms for monitoring, evaluation and learning (MEL) should be introduced, which can be reflected in the project imple¬mentation, as well as feed into the country/regional programmatic cycle. This will also increase capacity for adaptation. More adaptive programming, based on robust MEL, combined with strong and measur¬able indicators would allow for a shifting of priorities and resources where results are not being achieved. Stronger MEL would also provide opportunity for re¬view, reflection and adaptation as required. UN Women, OHCHR 2024/12 Initiated Incorporated into new programming under the Governance, Peace and Security umbrella.
At the start of any future project, consideration should be given to undertaking a broad baseline assessment, against which future progress can be tracked. This can not only be used to inform future planning and pro¬gramming but can also be used to assess the impact of the project’s interventions and contribute towards capturing higher level results. Any M&E framework developed must be gender sensitive. Developing a rigorous, scientific based monitoring framework that would generate gender and human rights sensitive evidence for showing the progress and the change resulting from the WA2J project implementation is of high relevance for future project stages. UN Women, OHCHR, ICJ 2024/12 Initiated Country assessment as well as NGO and project mappings were conducted in the inception phase of the project in 2018. It is noted, that any future programming should have stronger and more systematic systems in place to capture higher level results.
Recommendation: The project should engage with regional actors more to drive project results, contribute to their work and showcase project results. UN Women should leverage its convening role between governments, centralized and community-level justice actors, CSOs, women’s community-based organization and WHRDSs. In parallel, there is a need to continue efforts for strengthening country-level coordination efforts concerning women’s access to justice in all focus countries.
Management Response: UN Women has extensively collaborated with governments, centralized, and community-based justice mechanisms, connecting them with communities and the women's rights movement. This collaboration has significantly increased women's access to justice and has boosted trust in local justice mechanisms from 12% to 66% within three years. OHCHR has facilitated connections between Women Human Rights Defenders and national and international human rights mechanisms. There was potential for greater engagement with regional women's organizations throughout the project period.
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Description:
Management Response Category: Accepted
Thematic Area: Leadership and political participation (SPs before 2018)
Operating Principles: National ownership, Capacity development
Organizational Priorities: Partnership
UNEG Criteria: Effectiveness
Key Actions
Responsible Deadline Status Comments
UN Women should continue to foster regional networks and platforms for collaboration among participating countries, national and regional organizations, and stakeholders working on women’s access to justice in the region. Irrespective of any future iteration of the project UN Women and the responsible parties should continue to organise regular regional forums, conferences, and exchanges to facilitate dia-logue, knowledge sharing, and joint learning. Deepening the engagement with regional level or-ganisations. and recognising their valuable expertise, resources, and commitment to promoting women’s access to justice could further future results, while also providing an opportunity to share knowledge and experiences and showcase results from this phase of the project implementation. Collaborative efforts can include joint initiatives, knowledge-sharing, and capacity-building programmes. By forging strategic partnerships, UN Women partners can leverage additional expertise, resources, and networks, fostering long-term collaborations that contribute to the sustainability of strengthening women’s access to justice efforts. UN Women 2024/12 Not Initiated While UN Women acknowledges the importance of strengthening note that regional conferences are not always the most effective means of achieving this. This relatively expensive approach to regional exchange knowledge transfer at the regional level, it is important to could be replaced with digitalized knowledge hubs and exchanges that facilitate on-the-job learning and coaching. UN Women and its partners recognize the significance of regional organizations and their expertise. Future programming will feature enhanced partnerships with recommended organizations. It is important to highlight that the UN Women component on community-based justice necessitates the expertise and perspectives of grassroots women and their organizations to ensure that programming meets their needs. Although regional organizations frequently offer substantial knowledge and expertise at the policy and advocacy level, they do not always reflect the voices and needs of women in communities.
At the country level, there is a need to continue support for further scale-up and replication of the project’s pilot models as well as strengthening capacities to enhance coordination and collaboration among stakeholders involved in addressing women’s access to justice. The evaluation recommends fostering partnerships and knowledge sharing between UN Women and other initiatives, organizations, and projects on women’s access to justice in the region. UN Women 2024/12 Initiated UN Women has developed knowledge materials, SOPs (Standard Operating Procedures), and supported governments in scaling pilot initiatives with varying degrees of success. Knowledge about community justice and its impact has been disseminated at both the international level and the grassroots level, enabling CSOs (Civil Society Organizations) to continue their work. Throughout the project period, substantial efforts have been made to transfer knowledge to CSOs in the thematic areas of Access to Justice, as well as in resource mobilization, management, and financial and project reporting. For community justice officials, the project provided on-the-job coaching, developed SOPs, established referral mechanisms, and even contributed to infrastructure changes to ensure confidentiality for women seeking justice. Additionally, through community dialogues, the project fostered a stronger demand for effective justice mechanisms, indicating that further changes will be community-driven
Recommendation: Results gained through the pilot model initiatives to strengthen women’s access to justice should be replicated and scaled up and promoted at the regional level. The project should invest in institutionalizing its approaches through strengthening horizontal and vertical coordination mechanisms. The project should continue to ensure that it goes beyond traditional capacity development approaches when addressing women’s access to justice.
Management Response: The final evaluation of the "Enhancing Access to Justice" project has been completed over a period of seven months, led by UN Women. The pilot initiatives focusing on decentralization are thoroughly documented and encapsulated in various knowledge products, available at https://asiapacific.unwomen.org/en/focus-areas/governance/womens-access-to-justice Numerous knowledge transfer workshops and conferences have been conducted at both national and regional levels to ensure that the approach can be effectively scaled through UN Women programming, broader UN programming, and government planning.
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Description:
Management Response Category: Accepted
Thematic Area: Leadership and political participation (SPs before 2018)
Operating Principles: National ownership, Capacity development
Organizational Priorities: Partnership
UNEG Criteria: Sustainability
Key Actions
Responsible Deadline Status Comments
The scalability of pilot initiatives, as well as the sustainability of results achieved by the Project, has been a priority throughout the project implementation. While some of the pilot initiatives have already commenced adoption and/or scaling by national governments, including gender-responsive National Judicial Committees in Nepal, the joint network on non-adversarial justice providers bound through digital case management in Timor-Leste and informal justice and protection-mechanisms in the Peace Villages in Indonesia, these models need to be further replicated and scaled up as well as promoted at the regional level. In total, the project established 35 pilot promoting gender-responsive, community-based promoting gender-responsive, community-based justice mechanisms utilising a feminist and whole of community approach across 4 countries. By linking the community mechanisms to the central justice system, referral and sustainability were ensured and the justice gap for women lessened. The approach, methodology, results and lessons learned should now be utilised cross-country and at the regional level in similar jurisdictions. UN Women, OHCHR 2024/06 Initiated
Recommendation: The project has created a wealth of knowledge and evidence during its implementation period, which should be captured and institutionalised within the UN System. Consideration should be given to creating a knowledge and evidence-base hub or repository that can be accessible to all relevant stakeholders.
Management Response: Project gains, lessons learned, and knowledge were documented on the UN Women Regional Office Access to Justice webpage. Attempts to secure additional funding from Sida to expand the scope of this work were unfortunately unsuccessful. Should funding become available, UN Women is poised to make a significant contribution to knowledge and evidence-based programming, particularly leveraging insights gained from piloting decentralized justice initiatives. This includes innovative approaches that address the rights of women with disabilities, the rights of nature, indigenous peoples, and the development of people-centered and decentralized justice mechanisms, among others. https://asiapacific.unwomen.org/en/focus-areas/governance/womens-access-to-justice
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Description: Project gains, lessons learned, and knowledge were documented on the UN Women Regional Office Access to Justice webpage. Attempts to secure additional funding from Sida to expand the scope of this work were unfortunately unsuccessful. Should funding become available, UN Women is poised to make a significant contribution to knowledge and evidence-based programming, particularly leveraging insights gained from piloting decentralized justice initiatives. This includes innovative approaches that address the rights of women with disabilities, the rights of nature, indigenous peoples, and the development of people-centered and decentralized justice mechanisms, among others. https://asiapacific.unwomen.org/en/focus-areas/governance/womens-access-to-justice
Management Response Category: Partially Accepted
Thematic Area: Leadership and political participation (SPs before 2018)
Operating Principles: Knowledge management, Evidence, Data and statistics
Organizational Priorities: Culture of results/RBM
UNEG Criteria: Effectiveness
Key Actions
Responsible Deadline Status Comments
The Project created a vast pool of knowledge through its scalable pilots, innovative research, as well as partnerships and joint work with women’s civil society organisations, governments, regional intergovernmental bodies, academic institutions, and justice experts. The extensive and long-term partnerships with women grassroots organisations, civil society, organisations of persons with disabilities, government bodies, including the judiciary, as well as national and international human rights mechanisms, allowed the Project to gain considerable knowledge and experience on creating a gender-responsive and people-centred approach to justice, and created an enabling environment for the full realization of women’s human rights. UN Women 2024/06 Initiated UN Women has already made substantial efforts to capture the project materials, knowledge and advocacy material at the regional Access to Justice webpage. This was supported by wide social media outreach to invite visitors to the webpage. In addition, ICJ utilized the traditional media to promote their knowledge piece. OHCHR shared the project knowledge through reports and verbal contributions to the international human rights bodies allowing them to engage in an informed way with the countries. It is noted however, that a combine knowledge hub on gender justice would be beneficial for the region.
Recommendation: UN Women should reinforce its approach to Leave No One Behind by consolidating its efforts with some of the most marginalised groups of women in the region, including women with intellectual and psychosocial disabilities, indigenous women, LGBTIQ+ communities and women human rights defenders. In addition, efforts should be enhanced to engage with youth.
Management Response: The project team dedicated substantial efforts to implement a people-centered justice approach, with a particular emphasis on the Leave No One Behind (LNOB) principle. This focus encompassed indigenous women, economically disadvantaged women, women with disabilities, and the LGBTQI+ community. Notably, the initiative concerning justice for women with intellectual and psychosocial disabilities garnered the attention of other United Nations agencies. The methodology, which was adapted from the OECD legal needs survey methodology, was co-developed in collaboration with women with disabilities. This survey methodology has been requested and will be shared with the Resident Coordinator's Office (RCO) in India, RCO in Samoa, and the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) in Cambodia. UN Women acknowledges the recommendation to systematically involve youth. A stronger emphasis on youth, particularly young women, will be incorporated into future programming.
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Description:
Management Response Category: Accepted
Thematic Area: Leadership and political participation (SPs before 2018)
Operating Principles: Promoting inclusiveness/Leaving no one behind
Organizational Priorities: Not applicable
UNEG Criteria: Human Rights
Key Actions
Responsible Deadline Status Comments
The project has brought to the fore the justice gap for some of the furthest behind women in Asia and the Pacific - women with intellectual and/ or psychosocial disabilities, indigenous women, LGBTIQ+ communities and women human rights defenders and any future iterations of the project should continue to engage with these groups. UN Women and OHCHR need to continue to address the justice gap for these groups of women and reinforce and expand results gained. For example, the results of the legal needs survey for women with intellectual and psychosocial disabilities and associated justice mapping can inform targeted actions by governments and advocacy by organisations of persons with disabilities, underpinned by commitments made at the regional level1. Further, the adaptation of the OECD legal needs survey methodology for women with intellectual and psychosocial disabilities can be promoted at a regional and global level to encourage wide use and duplication. context. In addition to continued engagement with these groups of women, UN Women and OHCHR should expand its efforts to engage with youth as potential agents of change. Tapping in further the potential of youth is particularly important when addressing entrenched gender stereotypes and discriminatory behaviours in the region. UN Women, OHCHR 2025/03 Initiated The methodology was shared with three UN offices in the region as outlined above. Country-specific initiatives to implement the recommendations developed through the legal needs survey are currently developed.