UNGIS

United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women (UN Women) was established in July 2010 by the General Assembly (res. 64/289) to improve the coordination and coherence of gender equality and empowerment of women, and promote more effective gender mainstreaming across the UN system.

It consolidated the work of four UN gender entities: the UN Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM), the Division for the Advancement of Women, the Office of the Special Adviser on Gender Issues, and the UN International Research and Training Institute for the Advancement of Women. It has an additional role of leading, coordinating and promoting the accountability of the UN system in its work on gender equality and the empowerment of women.

UN Women's fundamental objective is to enhance national capacity and ownership to enable national partners to formulate gender-responsive laws and policies and to scale up successful strategies to deliver on national commitments to gender equality. It has five core principles:

• Providing demand-driven support to national partners to enhance implementation of international agreements and standards
• Supporting inter-governmental processes to strengthen the global normative and policy framework on gender equality
• Advocating for gender equality and women's empowerment, championing the rights of women and girls - particularly those who are most excluded
• Leading and promoting coherence in UN system work on gender equality
• Acting as a global broker of knowledge and experience, aligning practice with normative guidance.

UN Women's five thematic focus points are: expanding women's voice, leadership and participation; ending violence against women; strengthening implementation of women's peace and security agenda; enhancing women's economic empowerment; and making gender equality priorities central to national, local and sectoral planning, budgeting and statistics.

Several international agreements guide the work of UN Women: the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW); Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action (PFA); UN Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security (2000) and subsequent resolutions 1820 (2008), 1888 (2009), 1889 (2009) and 1960 (2010); and the Millennium Declaration and Millennium Development Goals.