News of progress, activations and new commitments may currently be found in the ‘news’ section of the Generation Equality Forum website . In addition, the annual accountability events and publications will be promoted by UN Women and all partners and will be an easy way for the public to engage and track progress.

Now that the work of Generation Equality is pivoting from the orchestration of the Forum events to the management of the 5-year action journey, several critical next steps are taking place:

1) Implementation of the accountability framework that will ensure transparency and monitoring around delivery of commitments – including the first Accountability Report in September 2022.

2) Analysis of the commitments made in Paris versus the Global Acceleration Plan to identify gaps and needed areas of focus for sourcing new commitments.

3) Launch of a Multi-Stakeholder Advisory Group

4) Agreement by UN Women and partners of a 5-year vision and objectives for this work in the next 5 years All of this work is being advanced and should be completed in Q1 2022.

In tandem with this work, the Action Coalitions and Compact are continuing to drive their thematic plans and advocacy goals, oversee commitments and galvanize new commitments; for example, the recent member state commitments on climate which were announced at COP 26 in November 2021.

Partners who have made commitments have submitted, through a data validation process, proposed edits and revisions for their commitments from January until September 2022. 
If you are an AC Leader or a Commitment Maker and have not validated your commitment and would like to request any edits, feel free to inform UN Women through this form.

The dataset validation process contains commitments submitted during the Generation Equality Forum in Paris and afterward through the online platform up until October 2021. Commitments submitted after this date as well as the revised dataset, based on the reporting submissions, will be published by UN Women soon. Aa tracker will also be made available for partners to easily check commitments implementation.

If you are interested in making a commitment to Generation Equality, contact us at actioncoalitions@unwomen.org to be notified when the updated registration form is available.

We recognize that more support and technical guidance to partners is needed to submit strong commitments. As a next step, we will develop a technical strategy to support partners and enable them to fully understand the commitments and the Action Coalition Accountability process.

At the current moment, collective commitments are being shown individually and as submitted by partners. In the next phase of development, a separate tab for collective commitments will be included in the Commitments Directory.

At this moment, all commitments are displayed in the Commitments Dashboard in the language they were submitted. Commitments will be translated for the next development phase, and it will include versions both in Spanish and French.

The purpose of the commitments reporting survey is to capture critical baseline information on the Generation Equality Action Coalition Commitments, as well as progress made in the implementation of the commitments. The information collected through this exercise contributes to the monitoring of progress towards commitments; and a better understanding of whether, how, and why commitments are accelerating progress towards gender equality, for women and girls in all their diversity.  

The commitments reporting survey was open through October. For the Generation Equality Accountability Report, answers submitted until July 25 were incorporated. In the year of 2023, the following commitments reporting survey will be another opportunity for those partners who have not yet reported the progress of their commitments.

The survey is for all Action Coalition Leaders and Commitment Makers.

Data collected in the survey were used to inform the annual Generation Equality Accountability Report on the Action Coalition commitments, including to analyze patterns across the commitments to better understand how implementation is unfolding overall and creating a baseline dataset for the Action Coalitions. Where relevant, it will also be used to update the commitments dashboard.

The response rate of 31 per cent is generally consistent with the response rate of similar processes. A meta-analysis of response rates for surveys used in organizational research found that the average response rate for studies that utilized data collected from organizations is 36 per cent, but can be as low as 18 per cent in some cases.1 However, given the centrality of accountability to drive success, it is critical for all commitment-makers to respond to the annual survey to collect baseline data – as was the case in this survey – and to continuously monitor the implementation of commitments. For this reason, UN Women is extending the survey until the end of October to promote a higher response rate.

Generation Equality calls for collective accountability and its success will heavily depend on the extent to which commitment makers take the reporting process seriously and report in a timely manner.

UN Women will undertake a stocktaking exercise to draw lessons and make any necessary changes to the reporting process to improve the response rate in subsequent survey rounds.

The target is to have as high a response rate as possible. This is particularly important for accountability but also to have the necessary baseline data to give a more accurate picture of Generation Equality and complement the data already displayed on the online Generation Equality platform. UN Women will periodically re-evaluate the responses received and determine whether an update might be warranted, including the possibility of publishing the data directly on the online platform. 

Guidance on financial reporting will be provided for next year’s reporting cycle. UN Women will work with commitment makers to discuss solutions. Where possible, it will address the challenge related to some partners’ challenges sharing financial information due to organizational policies. This is a key challenge to the transparency principle of accountability and UN Women will work with Action Coalition leaders to try to address it. 

After the survey was submitted this year and indicating that the commitment is complete, your organization does not need to complete the survey in future years if no further activities have been undertaken.

Yes, you will report on your progress via the survey annually. You should respond each year based on the scope and progress on implementation at the time of completing the survey.  

Based on the data to date, the majority, but not all, of the commitments are reflective of new work or new funding. Based on survey results, as much as $16.7 billion reporting to date or 68 per cent of the $24 billion is reflective of new or scaled funding (this number may not be indicative of all the $40B committed in Paris given that only 31% of commitments have currently reported).  

It’s also important to note that the intention of Generation Equality was both to leverage new funding and to recognize and accelerate implementation of existing work. Acceleration may take place via new or scaled funding, but also by fostering new types of partnerships and new ways of working that are underpinned by intersectionality, feminist leadership and transformational change.  
 
It is also important to note that $40B was the aggregate value of Paris commitments and not all of that value is represented in financial investments (for example, it could be the value of supply chain contracts re-directed to women-owned businesses).

It is too early yet in commitment implementation to measure impact, and year’s survey was designed to collect data to better understand the nature of GEF commitments and the status of their implementation

Subject to resource and data availability, in the second year of reporting an assessment of progress against the Global Acceleration Plan targets will be introduced. At that stage, a better assessment of gaps against the plan may be possible. 

A commitment is defined as an intended activity or set of activities, to accelerate progress towards one or multiple Action Coalitions by a specific stakeholder, or set of stakeholders, in a specific time frame. A commitment can be towards a specific community, and/or in a specific region, and/or be of a particular type (e.g., programmatic, advocacy, financial, and/or policy).

-          Internal commitments seek to advance gender equality within an organization's own employees/staff/members/institutional practices and strategies. Example: Over the next 5 years, we will commit to closing the gender pay gap in our company by auditing salaries disaggregated by gender and race/ethnicity, sharing those results within the company, and committing to measures to closing the gap.  

-          External commitments seek to advance gender equality in communities beyond an organization's own employees/staff/members/institutional practices and strategies. Example: Over the next 5 years, we will commit to closing the gender pay gap by funding Europe-based advocacy and policy organizations challenging the legal, policy, and cultural barriers that enable the gender pay gap to persist.  

-          Many commitments do both – with the internal and external component inter-related to one another.