Under-resourced sexual and reproductive health services have been reaching women and girls around the world through a range of key initiatives supported by a partnership between UNFPA and Takeda Pharmaceuticals formalized in 2020.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the partnership supported enhanced screening capacity as well as the emergency transport of women with obstetric and newborn health complications. It also helped provide essential supplies and personal protective equipment to front-line health workers.
In addition, the ongoing joint project “2 Hours to Life” has the potential to save the lives of some 1 million pregnant women and newborns in Benin, Côte D’Ivoire and Togo by ensuring access in under two hours to crucial maternal and newborn services for 90 per cent of pregnant women. The project also supports innovative solutions to help provide quality emergency obstetric and newborn care in remote locations, including telemedicine, drones for last-mile service delivery and advanced mobile and GPS technologies.
A further project of the partnership, “Women at the Centre,” provides support to survivors of gender-based violence through quality case management services in Azerbaijan, El Salvador, Indonesia, Madagascar and Zimbabwe. With a goal of training more than 40,000 case workers, the programme is investing in capacity building and professionalization of the social-services workforce, ensuring that front-line gender-based violence responders are equipped to provide immediate skilled support for all women and girls, including the most marginalized. In addition to enabling increased quality and coverage of case management, the programme supports community outreach to foster trust and mitigate risks.
Updated 4 June 2025
Gender-based violence case management is a structured method for providing support by informing gender-based violence survivors of all available options for healing and recovery. The issues and challenges faced by a survivor are identified and addressed in a coordinated manner, and emotional support is provided throughout the process. Case management has become the primary entry point for survivors to receive crisis and longer-term psychosocial support.
Response mechanisms to gender-based violence in many countries are often insufficient, lacking coordination, funding and human resources to adequately address this human rights violation.
Typically, where there is investment in gender-based violence case management, it is currently focused on increased access to health and legal services rather than supporting comprehensive case management that addresses the holistic needs of a survivor. In addition, current gender-based violence case management standards and practices often do not focus on specific knowledge, attitudes and skills needed to adapt services for marginalized survivors, leaving social workers without sufficient capacity to assist these individuals.
The lack of professional recognition/accreditation and continuing education in many countries is a disincentive to maintaining an adequate national body of social workers equipped to meet international standards of care for survivors of violence.
UNFPA works in partnership with government agencies, academic institutions and civil society actors to build strong gender-based violence case management systems across the five implementing countries through the following activities:
These objectives will lead to increased and sustained accessible services for survivors of gender-based violence, while community engagement will also contribute to preventing gender-based violence and completing the pathway to deliver the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (SDG 5.3: End all forms of harmful practices and gender-based violence by 2030).
Updated 24 April 2025
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16 May 2022
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12 November 2019
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