Fund Dates

• Start Date: 16 November 2015
• End Date:  31 December 2021

JP Gender Equality Georgia II - Reports

• 2020 Annual Narrative Progress Report
• 2020 Annual Financial Progress Report
• 2020 Sources and Uses of Funds
  

JP Gender Equality Georgia II - Key Documents

• Programme document
• Memorandum of Understanding (MoU)
• Standard Administrative Arrangement (SAA)

Overview

The Joint Programme addresses gender inequality in a coherent and comprehensive manner, covering a wide range of issues, such as political and economic empowerment of women, reducing violence against women and girls and promotion of women’s sexual and reproductive health and reproductive rights. Therefore, it is mandatory to pool together and unify efforts of UN agencies in order to pave the way for a more effective response to the truly complex and multifaceted problem in the country. Consequently, the Joint Programming modality is the most effective approach to build on and complement the mandates, capacities, experience and expertise of each agency (UNDP, UN Women and UNFPA), and thus tackle an overly complex issue in Georgian society.

The overall goal of the project is to promote gender equality and women’s empowerment by means of strengthening capacities of government at both central and local levels and across the executive, legislative and judicial branches, engaging civil society and raising public awareness about gender equality. This ambitious goal will be achieved by realization of the following outcomes:

• Enhanced women’s political and economic empowerment
• Enabling environment to eliminate violence against women and girls, especially sexual and domestic violence, created in Georgia

• Advanced gender equality and reproductive rights, including for the most vulnerable women, adolescents and youth    

The geographic area for the Joint Programme covers Tbilisi, Kakheti and Samegrelo Regions. The activities will be implemented in partnership with the Government, local authorities and CSOs, including women organizations.

Assistance Strategy

The project has a holistic approach by simultaneously targeting three interrelated levels (national, local and grassroots) and applying multi-tiered programming approaches:

• Policy advice - to advocate for streamlining of national legislation and policies in view of gender equality including, political and economic empowerment, violence against women and girls, reproductive rights; and recommend improvements; adjust policies, develop/update the action plans; support evidence-based policy dialogue between policy and decision makers, the legislature and women’s rights and gender equality advocates as well as communities at grassroots level;
• Strengthening national systems – to enhance coordination and implementation of innovative policies and plans related to gender equality, including political and economic empowerment, SRH&RR, prevention and response to violence against women and girls, as well as supporting development and institutionalization of monitoring mechanisms of implementation.
• Strengthening public advocacy – to enhance the capacities of rights-holders on the issue of gender equality and women’s political and economic empowerment, domestic and other forms of violence against women and girls, harmful practices and reproductive rights by mobilizing and supporting participatory advocacy platforms with civil society and communities at grassroots level.

The UNJP is fully aligned with national priorities in the area of gender equality and the stated goals and priority areas of the United Nations Development Assistance Framework for Georgia (2010-15) and UN Partnership Framework (2016-2020), as well as the Results Strategy for Sweden’s Reform Cooperation with Eastern Europe, the Western Balkans and Turkey (2014 – 2020).

A human rights-based approach will be at the heart of the programme while developing capacities and opportunities for both duty-bearers and rights-holders. The programme will strengthen the capacity of duty bearers, i.e. central and local government institutions to effectively fulfil their obligations and increase accountability as well as supporting rights holders to effectively claim their rights. All programme activities will be based and will apply universal human rights principles such as: equality and non-discrimination, participation and inclusion, accountability and rule of law.    

Ensuring sustainability of the achieved results will remain at the heart of the programme and will be strongly emphasised over its entire duration.  

Governance

The programme will be jointly implemented by UNFPA, UN Women and UNDP. UNDP will continue to serve as the Administrative Agent of the programme while UN Women will serve as the Convening Agent.  The Programme Management Unit will be recruited comprised of programme managers for each programme component, supported by Administrative/Finance Assistants and Drivers/Logisticians.

A Programme Steering Committee is established with the participation of senior personnel of all signatories to the joint programme document with similar level of decision-making authority including representatives of the three UN participating agencies and national coordinating authorities. Swedish Government is invited to join the Steering Committee with an observer’s status. The main role of the Steering Committee is to provide strategic guidance for programme implementation, approve programme annual work plans, including annual targets for the results framework and review progress against set targets. The programme steering committee, co-chaired by UN Resident Coordinator and the Chair of the Parliamentary Council for Gender Equality meets at least once a year, in the first quarter of each calendar year.

Administrative Agent

The Multi-Partner Trust Fund Office (MPTF Office) of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) serves as the Administrative Agent (AA) of the Joint Programme. The AA is responsible for concluding Standard Administrative Arrangements (SAAs) with donors and Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Participating UN Organisations.

UN Women will serve as the Convening Agency (CA) accountable for coordination of joint programmatic activities and narrative reporting to the AA. The CA is responsible for programmatic coordination of UNJP joint components and for preparation of annual and final consolidated narrative progress reports based on the reports submitted by each participating UN organization. The CA provides those consolidated reports to the Administrative Agent for further submission to the donor.