Skip to content

Show me the money: the fight for funding and accountability for women’s rights

Aid donors, governments and the United Nations have made many commitments to gender equality. Their actions have been less impressive.

Published:

UN secretary-general António Guterres.

UN secretary-general António Guterres walks with women at Za’atari refugee camp. Photo: Flickr/UN Women. Some rights reserved.

Across United Nations programmes, gender equality is vastly underfunded. When the UN Women agency was created in 2010, activists estimated that it needed at least a $1 billion budget (for comparison, total revenue for the children’s agency UNICEF was over $4.8 billion in 2016).