Management Response

: Regional Office for Asia and the Pacific (Thailand)
: 2024 - 2024 , Regional Office for Asia and the Pacific (Thailand) (RO)
: Regional Office Asia and the Pacific SN Evaluation
:
:

Regional Office for Asia and the Pacific (Thailand)

:

The evaluation of the UN Women Regional Office for Asia and the Pacific (ROAP) Strategic Note was strategic as it supported the office in the development of the new Strategic Note for 2026-2029. The methodology was highly collaborative, leveraging initial evaluation findings and Theory of Change workshops. This ensured strong alignment between impact areas and systemic outcomes, and normative frameworks throughout the SN’s design and implementation. Further, the process emphasized coordination and the embedding of normative frameworks, with a clear focus on subregional engagement. This collaborative approach fostered clarity among UN Women personnel and partners regarding strategic priorities and approaches. The recommendations that emanated from the evaluation report are timely as they intersected with the recommendations coming out of the UN Women Functional Review, which prompted the Regional Office to clarify internal structures, processes, and guidance for knowledge management, innovation, and capacity building. Building on the UN Women global Strategic Plan, the Strategic note reflects a sharper focus on upstream engagement, through systemic outcomes which will enhance and leverage the four impact areas. Further, the establishment of standardized guidelines and a centralized SharePoint hub for knowledge products are notable outcomes.
: Approved
Recommendation: Leverage the development of the next Strategic Note as a timely opportunity to sharpen UN Women’s strategic focus in the region by clearly defining priorities, deepening coherence and leadership in normative work, and institutionalizing adaptive, forward-looking planning that responds to emerging trends and subregional dynamics.
Management Response: The RO SN was developed through a highly collaborative and synergistic approach, with initial findings from the SN evaluation providing critical guidance for its formulation. The RO conducted theory of change workshops to ensure that the four impact areas were fully aligned with the three systemic outcomes—normative, institutions, and agency. By framing the SN around these three systemic outcomes through the four impact areas, the normative work will be further strengthened. The approach places greater emphasis on coordination and on embedding normative frameworks throughout the design, delivery, and implementation of the SN. The SN also articulates subregional engagement, maintaining strong collaboration with ASEAN, while driving a focused engagement strategy for South Asia and the Pacific.
More detail
Description:
Management Response Category: Accepted
Thematic Area: Not applicable
Operating Principles: Alignment with strategy, Internal coordination and communication
Organizational Priorities: Not applicable
UNEG Criteria: Relevance
Key Actions
Responsible Deadline Status Comments
Ensure UN Women personnel and partners have clarity on RO strategic priorities and its approach to how it will advance them Regional Office senior management with support from thematic units and the Planning, Monitoring and Reporting unit 2025/09 Completed UNW personnel and partners have a clear understanding of the RO’s strategic priorities and approach. Through a highly collaborative process—including orientations, feedback sessions, and sub-regional discussions with CSOs/NGOs, donors, bilateral partners, UN agencies, and Representatives—the RO SN was developed using evaluation findings and Theory of Change workshops. These sessions took place during Q1-3 in 2025
Leadership group reconfigured, with allocated time focusing on thematic discussion, which includes coordination, to drive normative work through impact areas, including a focus on trend analysis and forecasting for cohesive approach to emerging trends RD, DRD, Thematic leadership for impact areas Political participation. WEE, WPS/HA, EVAW and Coordination 2026/03 Initiated Regional Office leadership group, comprised of thematic leads of impact areas, as well as leads of functional areas of work, will be reconfigured. The Thematic leadership will focus on strategic direction and coherence across all impact areas, ensuring that normative work is systematically embedded throughout regional programming and support to UNW presences. The group will serve as a central mechanism for aligning technical leadership, coordination, and normative functions to drive the delivery of the three systemic outcomes. Through this strengthened structure, the Thematic Leadership Group will reinforce the Regional Office’s ability to influence normative processes, respond to regional dynamics, and ensure that technical, normative, and coordination inputs are integrated and mutually reinforcing across the region.
Recommendation: The Regional Office should prioritize its core functions as the basis for regional engagement, use clear criteria to guide regional programming, rebalance subregional focus, and clarify direction and expectations of non-physical presences ensuring alignment with regional support capacities.
Management Response: The Regional Office has already taken concrete steps to prioritize its core functions and clarify the basis for regional engagement. The RO has strengthened its dual roles—operational backstopping and regional thought leadership/innovation—and this distinction is now clearly reflected in practice and in the SN. Day-to-day cross-regional support, operational and functional oversight, and strategic interventions continue to be delivered cohesively and region-wide. The SN further articulates the RO’s approach to ensuring a balanced subregional focus and clarifies expectations for support to Country Offices, NPPs, and non-physical presences, in line with regional support capacities. The UNW footprint in region is maintained through technical and coordination support across all modalities. The RO has also established mechanisms that reinforce strategic alignment, including an internal resource-mobilization repository managed by External Relations and a streamlined concept-note development process. These ensure a coherent, system-outcomes–driven approach to regional programming and engagement. The RO continues to advance the Gender Equality Acceleration Plan and to leverage human rights and normative mechanisms to strengthen regional support.
More detail
Description:
Management Response Category: Partially Accepted
Thematic Area: Not applicable
Operating Principles: Internal coordination and communication
Organizational Priorities: Not applicable
UNEG Criteria: Effectiveness, Efficiency, Coherence
Key Actions
Responsible Deadline Status Comments
Clearly articulated sub-regional focus within the strategic note, with prioritization of resources, improved internal coherence and regional presence. Regional Director 2025/11 Completed The Strategic Note articulates sub-regional priorities, emphasizing ASEAN, South Asia, and the Pacific. It strengthens south–south and north–south collaboration—particularly through UN Women’s presence in ROK and China—which creates important opportunities to advance regional focused programming. Implementation and follow-up will be coordinated through the Thematic Leadership Group, ensuring coherence and alignment. The realignment of activities to the SN’s systemic outcomes further enhances internal coherence and enables the RO to provide more targeted and integrated support across sub-regions.
Develop and test international guidance to prioritize regional programmes that align with RO core functions and regionality criteria. improved alignment of regional programming with RO strategic role. DRD 2025/10 Completed Guidance and procedures based on regionality criteria were developed in Q2 and are being applied. This includes a strengthened process for resource mobilization, including centralized donor intelligence, concept note review, alignment with systemic outcomes and based on a sub and regional needs analysis. Coherence between programme delivery and core functions enhanced through aligned functional and technical support capacity, tracked by the Leadership group. Working with corporate leads, enhancing RO internal guide on RM partnership, to support cross regional/sub regional.
Track thematic support to country offices to identify priorities, opportunities and entry points for streamlined programming. DRD 2026/03 Not Initiated A tracking tool will be introduced for thematic teams to record their support to country offices in the region, ensuring that RO align priorities, opportunities and entry points in a unified way. The tracking tool will also support the RO in re-balancing sub-regional focus.
Recommendation: The Regional Office should develop a theory of change and strategy for its regional coordination work, focusing on working collaboratively – both internally and externally – to advance shared goals and leverage investments for gender equality and women’s empowerment, including for women’s civil society
Management Response: The Regional Office acknowledges the recommendation and welcomes UNW corporate focus to develop theory of change and strategy for our UN Coordination work. For the SN actions outlined have already been initiated, and the Strategic Note has strengthened its focus on normative and UN Coordination functions in alignment with regional priorities. Building on this progress, the Regional Office has enhanced its collaborative approaches internally and externally to advance shared goals and maximize investments in gender equality and women’s empowerment, including support to civil society working on women’s rights. SN articulates how our UN Coordination will be central to our normative, programmatic and partnership modalities. This will enable the ROAP to enhance UN collective ownership of our normative principles. It will also promote more coherent and integrated efforts, and UN Women will be better positioned to leverage the efforts and resources of the UN system in advancing GEWE. – and greater collective impact across the region. A mechanism for coordinating the approach to women’s civil society will be developed by the thematic leadership which includes coordination with the view to ensure synergistic approaches and embedding the normative. .
More detail
Description:
Management Response Category: Accepted
Thematic Area: Not applicable
Operating Principles: Not applicable
Organizational Priorities: UN Coordination
UNEG Criteria: Coherence
Key Actions
Responsible Deadline Status Comments
Strategy For Internal And External Coordination Partnership Work Developed RO Coordination 2025/12 Initiated As co-chair of the IBC on HR-GEWE and Disability Inclusion, the RO has significantly strengthened the interface between the IBC and UNCTs. A coordination strategy/action plan is being developed to outline internal (UN Women) and external (UN system/intergovernmental) coordination, define pathways of change, and clarify roles for collaborative normative and programmatic delivery. The plan will introduce a tiered support mechanism for Country Offices, NPPs, UN Women presences that are UNSDCF signatories, and countries where UN Women is not a signatory. Advancing the GEAP will anchor technical support across all four tiers, with support calibrated to each category. Key actions include: • Mapping CO/NPP/UNCT GEAP implementation and sharing findings with the Thematic Leadership Group for strategic planning; • Supporting GE Country Profiles linked to SWOP scorecards and UNCT frameworks; • Providing sensitization and orientation on GEAP commitments; • Ensuring thematic leadership inputs to Country Profiles; • Developing an engagement strategy and service offer for UNCTs where UN Women has no formal presence.
CSO/women’s movement engagement strategy/approach developed. Coordination + thematic leads. 2026/03 Initiated Establishment of Coordination mechanism for shared approach to Civil Society and Women’s Movement Engagement, led by the Coordination Unit with substantive inputs from thematic leads. This will position CSO engagement as a central component of normative and conveening. Key actions will include: • Roles of civil society engagement across regional programmes, with a view to strengthen partnerships through coordination mechanisms, joint advocacy, and support to intergovernmental processes. Focus on the convening element, knowledge generation and normative • Ensuring that thematic impact areas systematically integrate CSO engagement in planning, implementation, and monitoring. • Strengthening linkages between CSO engagement and normative processes, including CEDAW follow-up, Beijing+ reviews, and GEAP implementation.
Recommendation: The Regional Office should strengthen its leadership in knowledge generation, innovation and capacity strengthening by clarifying the structures to support it, establishing clear processes and internal guidance for the planning, dissemination and measurement of the use of knowledge products and capacity-building efforts, while finalizing its strategy for integrating AI responsibly into its work
Management Response: RO accepts this recommendation. In line with this recommendation, the RO has initiated actions to clarify the internal structures that will guide and support these functions, ensuring that roles, responsibilities, and decision-making lines are clearly defined. RO has established standardized processes and internal guidance for the planning, quality assurance, dissemination, and monitoring of knowledge products. This will include the development of tools and protocols to measure uptake, assess relevance, and track the contribution of knowledge and learning efforts to regional and country-level results. In addition, the RO will continue the emerging work on integration of AI anchored in UN system-wide principles on ethics, human rights, and transparency, and will ensure that innovation processes remain safe, inclusive, and aligned with the organization’s normative mandate. This will be continued through targeted technical assistance. Collectively, these measures will reinforce the Regional Office’s leadership role, enhance institutional learning, and strengthen the impact of knowledge and innovation efforts across the region.
More detail
Description:
Management Response Category: Accepted
Thematic Area: Not applicable
Operating Principles: Innovation and technology
Organizational Priorities: Not applicable
UNEG Criteria: Effectiveness, Efficiency
Key Actions
Responsible Deadline Status Comments
Knowledge management guidelines, structures and priorities in place DRD 2025/06 Completed Guidelines and processes for knowledge management were finalized in Q2 2025. These include the integration of normative guidance—covering CEDAW, disability inclusion, and related human rights frameworks—across knowledge generation and dissemination workflows. The guidelines specify sign-off by all thematic areas to ensure that the product is relevant to the work of UN Women and of high quality. Publication guidelines have been established, and a centralized SharePoint hub has been created to support consistent documentation, access, and use of the knowledge products.
Ensure streamlined coordination and coherence with UN Women knowledge and partnership centre capacity-building and knowledge generation with regional normative, coordination and thematic work. DRD 2026/09 Initiated Working closely with the RO and HQ in shaping Phase I, the Centre has deepened its thematic focus by advancing work on the care economy, technology-facilitated gender-based violence, and strengthened knowledge generation and capacity-building. Phase II will be fully aligned with the Regional Office Strategic Note, including its normative and coordination priorities. The ongoing evaluation of the Centre will further guide actions to reinforce coherence between HQ, the RO’s thematic priorities, and the Centre’s focus areas, ensuring effective and synergistic delivery across the region. This will be actioned when Phase II of the Centre is in place.
Building enabling culture for innovation by piloting incentives, knowledge sharing on innovative practices integrating ai for gender equality, backed by relevant expertise DRD 2026/03 Initiated The Strategic Note builds on already undertaken innovation efforts, and has a strengthened focus on deepening the use of AI and digitalization across the region. Technical capacities are being enhanced to support Country Offices in integrating innovative and digitally enabled approaches into programming and coordination work. Capacity-building and technical assistance—delivered through flexible, non-staff modalities—ensure access to specialized expertise that advances innovation
Recommendation: The Regional Office should clarify roles and expectations of both thematic and functional units with the aim of enhancing cross-unit collaboration; coordinated support to UN Women presences; fostering innovation and results-based learning across teams; and strengthening approaches for coordinated and sustainable resource mobilization.
Management Response: RO accepts this recommendation. Actions will be undertaken through the development of a strengthened management and ways-of-work approach informed by functional review and aligned with the roll-out of the Strategic Note. This approach will ensure that RO is fit for purpose and able to deliver the Strategic Note effectively within current resource parameters. RO build on the thematic leadership group organized around the three systemic outcomes of the SN, anchored in the four impact areas—Women’s Economic Empowerment, Women’s Political Participation, Women, Peace and Security and Humanitarian Action, and Ending Violence Against Women—underpinned by Gender Statistics, and Coordination to ensure evidence-based decision-making. The thematic leadership model will embed coordination functions to drive both normative commitments and internal and external coordination results. The thematic leadership group will be collectively accountable for advancing coherent and integrated implementation across the three systemic outcomes, strengthening synergies, reducing fragmentation, and ensuring that regional efforts contribute meaningfully to corporate and country-level impact. Functional leadership group will focus on operational, programmatic, planning, monitoring and evaluation results.
More detail
Description:
Management Response Category: Accepted
Thematic Area: Not applicable
Operating Principles: Knowledge management, Internal coordination and communication, Innovation and technology, Resource mobilization
Organizational Priorities: Organizational efficiency
UNEG Criteria: Efficiency
Key Actions
Responsible Deadline Status Comments
Institutionalize cross-unit planning and review mechanisms as platforms that go beyond corporate reporting requirements, fostering genuine collaboration, alignment and visibility into each team’s work through joint planning, reporting and periodic stocktaking. DRD 2026/03 Not Initiated Leadership group to be established with dual purposes of thematic alignment and functional oversight. The Leadership group will be divided into thematic leadership and functional leadership, with cross engagement across the groups, as needed and relevant. The thematic leadership will focus and be structured around three systemic outcomes and anchored in the four impact areas: Women’s Economic Empowerment; Women’s Political Participation; Women, Peace and Security and Humanitarian Action; and Ending Violence Against Women, underpinned by Gender Statistics. This structure will strengthen thematic coherence, reinforce accountability, and ensure that technical, normative, and coordination functions are fully integrated across the regional portfolio. The Functional/Cross-Pillar Group will be focused on strengthening operational and management mechanisms, tracking country-level delivery, and supporting second-line oversight in line with the DOA. The group enhances coherence across pillars and ensures timely monitoring and coordinated support to offices. A tiered system of UN Women support will be advanced to guide normative, coordination, and operational assistance across different UN Women presences: Country Offices – full-spectrum support across all functions; NPPs – targeted, hands-on technical and coordination support; UN Women presences that are UNSDCF signatories – strategic and technical engagement to fulfil joint commitments; Countries where UN Women is not a UNSDCF signatory – tailored, demand-driven support focused on priority normative and coordination needs.
Strengthen collective resource mobilization by embedding joint donor engagement and planning across thematic units. strategy led by external relations unit and driven by thematic leadership group, grounded in established guidance for concept note development which requires senior leadership sign-off before development and submission. RD/DRD/ERU 2025/09 Completed New SOPs in place Strengthened and collective resource mobilization will be embedded as a core function in the implementation of the new SN. RO has established a concept note development procedure in which the RD makes the final go/no-go decision, confirms country focus, and allocates roles and responsibilities across units. This ensures alignment with regional priorities, prevents duplication, and promotes an efficient and strategic approach to donor engagement. Collective resource mobilization will be driven jointly by the Thematic Leadership Group under the overall coordination of External Relations Unit, operating within established corporate and regional guidance. Joint donor engagement, coordinated planning, and harmonized messaging across thematic units will ensure a unified and coherent approach to resource mobilization. Through these measures, the RO will strengthen its ability to mobilize resources collectively, enhance donor confidence, and ensure that investments are strategically aligned with regional priorities and the delivery of systemic outcomes.
Recommendation: The Regional Office should systematically apply intersectionality and environmental standards across all its programming and coordination efforts to ensure meaningful inclusion of marginalized groups and strengthen environmental safeguards in line with UN Women’s global commitments.
Management Response: RO partially accepts the recommendation recognizing that intersectionality and LNOB has been systematically been integrated in convenings and programming, although recognizes that this can be conducted more systematically. Further, it is acknowledged that environmental sustainability standards can be measured across all programming and coordination efforts, in line with UN Women’s global commitments and corporate priorities. To operationalize this recommendation, RO will ensure that LNOB and intersectionality are embedded within technical programmes through the provision of shared tools, guidance, and specialized expertise accessible to Country Offices and NPP. The modality will be made available through cost-recovery or pooled resource arrangements to promote consistency, efficiency, and long-term sustainability. In parallel, climate risk and environmental sustainability measures will be integrated into relevant corporate systems and processes, including the OEEF indicators and the regional risk register review. This will strengthen the systematic incorporation of environmental considerations into programme design, implementation, and oversight, reinforcing the RO’s commitment to environmental safeguards and resilience-building. The Regional Office is committed to ensuring that these measures are fully implemented and monitored, contributing to more inclusive, equitable, and environmentally responsible programming across the region.
More detail
Description:
Management Response Category: Partially Accepted
Thematic Area: Not applicable
Operating Principles: Not applicable
Organizational Priorities: Not applicable
UNEG Criteria: Human Rights, Gender equality
Key Actions
Responsible Deadline Status Comments
Leave no one behind agenda and intersectionality to be sourced through technical programmes, shared resources to be made available on a cost recovery/pooled resource basis DRD 2026/03 Initiated LNOB and intersectionality will be sourced and embedded through technical programmes, with shared tools, guidance, and resources made available to Country Offices and NPPs. Access to specialized support will be facilitated through cost-recovery or pooled resource arrangements to ensure consistency and sustainability. Non-staff modalities will be used.
Climate risk and environmental sustainability measures reflected in OEEF indicators and risk register review DRD/Operations 2026/03 Initiated Climate risk and environmental sustainability measures will be reflected in OEEF indicators and integrated into the regional risk register review process. This will ensure that environmental considerations are systematically incorporated into programme planning, delivery, and oversight.