Ukrainian and international NGOs working on the gendered impacts of the war in Ukraine continue to call for all reconstruction and recovery processes to ensure the full, equal, meaningful and safe participation and leadership of diverse Ukrainian women and to put gender equality at the centre. The upcoming Ukraine Recovery Conference in Rome (URC25), co-hosted by the Governments of Ukraine and Italy, should reflect this.
Recommendations for Governments, Co-Chairs, Donors and International Organizations:
Representation
- Facilitate the full, equal, direct, safe, meaningful and substantial participation, representation, and leadership of women of all ages, girls and marginalised groups in all their diversity, and their organizations, in discussions and decisions on priorities for the recovery process at all levels (from local to national and beyond), including at the Ukraine Recovery Conferences and other relevant fora. Women should not be relegated to the sessions on the human dimension at the URCs. Support, including funding, for WROs/WLOs is critical to ensure this.
- Ensure wider meaningful participation of Ukrainian NGOs in the Gender Alliance, including in its Core Group.
Resources
- Increase the volume and improve the quality (flexible, multi-year, including core funding) of the funding to WROs/WLOs as lack of quality funding, especially amid the current funding crisis, impedes the sustainability of WLOs/WROs and compromises their ability to participate in the recovery and reconstruction process.
- Flexible, long-term funding is key to support WROs/WLOs‘ activities to advocate for gender equality and women’s rights (e.g. implementation of UNSCR 1325 on Women, Peace and Security and the Istanbul Convention in Ukraine) and implement gender-transformative interventions that benefit entire communities. Recovery and reconstruction plans and strategies as well as the Alliance for Gender-responsive and Inclusive Recovery should have the ambition to transform gender norms, not just to “respond”, as a fundamental strategy to achieve gender equality and prevent a surge of GBV and especially of Violence Against Women.
- Provide dedicated funding for the institutional development and organisational strengthening of WROs/WLOs, for increased networking between them, to enable them to have a stronger voice in decision-making on reconstruction and recovery, and for dedicated technical, coordination and advocacy positions.
- Open the Ukraine Community Recovery Fund to directly support Ukrainian national NGOs, including WROs/WLOs.
- Simplify and harmonise funding application processes and reporting requirements to increase smaller WROs/WLOs’ ability to secure funding.
- Set funding targets for recovery programmes that advance gender equality as well as targets for funding to WROs/WLOs and enhance accountability and transparency on progress against these targets by reporting publicly and regularly against them. When establishing such financial commitments, it is necessary to ensure specific and context-adapted budgetary commitments for the short-, medium- and long-term programmes (e.g. 3, 5 and 10 years).
Rights:
- Invest in policies and measures that will protect and ensure equitable access of women of all ages, girls and marginalised groups in rural and urban areas to services they need and opportunities to rebuild their lives, including dignified economic and livelihood opportunities, formal and non-formal education etc., based on the 10 Blocks of Gender Inclusive Recovery1.
- Invest in gender-transformative social protection schemes that compensate women’s domestic care work combined with strategies to support women’s equitable access to economic and educational opportunities, to enable them to participate in the recovery process as actors rather than passive recipients.
- Promote and resource age, gender, disability and diversity responsive trauma care, mental health and psychosocial support, including for ex-combatants, and invest in gender based (and other survivors) violence survivor-centred case management, including access to justice, that places the rights, safety and wishes of survivors at the centre of accountability mechanisms.
Accountability:
- Ensure the agendas of URCs and follow-up fora reflect commitments to GEEWG, and that diverse Ukrainian CSOs, including WROs/WLOs, are involved in preparing them and invited on all panels and main thematic events.
- Ensure that the URC25 takes stock of the commitments made on three previous conferences, including further promotion of GEEWG through enhanced authority and coordination with the Gender Alliance and its increased accountability.
- Ensure that commitments made at Ukraine Recovery Conference 2025 and follow-up conferences will be implemented and progress monitored and reported transparently – accountability is key to ensure that commitments are translated into action. Consult civil society organisations, including WROs/WLOs, on their perspectives on progress and any corrective action plans to correct course.
Context:
Gender equality and the empowerment of women and girls (GEEWG) has received very little attention in the first two Ukraine Recovery Conferences in Lugano in 2022 and in London in 2023. It has also been largely absent from the various recovery and reconstruction plans that have been formulated by donor governments and international organisations to date. In 2024, when the governments of Germany and Ukraine co-hosted the URC, gender received more attention and more NGOs, including women’s rights organisations (WROs), were invited to join the conference compared to the previous URCs. However, the goal to have civil society representation on every panel remained unmet. Besides the dedicated gender panel, only one women-led organization (WLO) was invited as a speaker. The main sessions were also not open to contributions from the floor, preventing spontaneous contributions, reactions or questions from civil society representatives, women leaders and feminists in the audience, further limiting the space and voice of diverse civil society organisations.
For the first time, the 2024 URC had a dedicated thematic panel on “Gender Mainstreaming and Female Leadership: Ensuring Gender-Responsive and Inclusive Recovery for Ukraine”, organized by UN Women Ukraine in collaboration with the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development of Germany (BMZ) and the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine. The Alliance for Gender-Responsive and Inclusive Recovery (‘The Gender Alliance’) was launched at the URC24 by UN Women Ukraine in collaboration with BMZ and the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine. The Alliance aims to ensure that gender equality and women’s empowerment are central to Ukraine’s recovery and reconstruction efforts. However, besides the gender panel and the launch of the alliance, gender perspectives were largely absent at the conference – contrary to the announcement to integrate gender as a cross-cutting issue throughout the entire conference.
In 2025, Italy and Ukraine will co-host the URC in Rome. It is crucial that progress achieved at last year’s URC is not stalled but, instead, that it is accelerated and deepened this year. This implies investing in genuine meaningful participation of Ukrainian NGOs, including WROs, as both attendants and speakers / decision-makers on panels and main sessions in events leading to and at the conference itself.
The full, equal, meaningful, safe and direct participation of diverse women, girls and marginalised groups in all decision-making processes, in line with the Government of Ukraine’s Women, Peace and Security National Action Plan until 2025, is key to formulating and delivering a recovery agenda that is equitable, inclusive and gender-transformative. Unless gender equality and the empowerment of women and girls is deliberately made central to recovery processes now, systemic barriers facing women and girls and their organisations to meaningfully contribute to the humanitarian response (e.g. improving but still limited participation, difficulty to access quality funding for women’s rights and women-led organisations (WRO/WLO)) will be replicated in Ukraine’s reconstruction and recovery process, deepening existing gender inequality. However, the potential of development finance for supporting a gender-responsive recovery is still largely underutilised. For example, funding from the Ukraine Community Recovery Fund, to date the only UN-administered fund for recovery of Ukraine, is only directly accessible for UN agencies. Integrating gender equality in official development assistance (ODA) channeled through multilateral development banks also remains a challenge and may imply missed opportunities in macroeconomic support.
We welcome the intentions of the URC25’s co-hosts to build on the achievements of the URC24 in Berlin by promoting the four thematic dimensions it established, including the human dimension; and dedicated efforts to ensure gender mainstreaming at the conference based on the Government Commissioner for Gender Equality Policy. recommendations. Yet, there are still gaps in ensuring that URC25 translates into concrete actions and that gender equality and meaningful representation and leadership of women, girls and marginalized groups is prioritised consistently and sustainably in the reconstruction and recovery process. For example, the URC25 Concept Note does not reflect any commitments on ensuring gender mainstreaming and further places women as a group of interest to the human dimension only.
Signatories:
CARE International
Zhiva-Ya
Stabilization Support Services
Safe Space, NGO
Association of Roma Women “Voice of Romni”
NGO Girls
Ukrainian women lawyers association “JurFem”
