Lessons learned

The section below presents some key lessons from the implementation of the Global Programme. The lessons are extracted from overall analysis of data and evidence collected by the Global Programme and illustrated with examples from Global Programme countries, territories and regions.

Lesson 1

Human-rights based approach and collaboration amongst national and local actors are key to the successful implementation and sustainability of people-centred justice services, improving access to justice for vulnerable and marginalized groups.

Adopting a human rights-based approach and collaborating with duty bearers and rights holders is essential to bring justice closer to the people and ensure a people-centred approach to justice. Legal empowerment initiatives, such as mobilizing legal aid camps, legal aid clinics, beneficiary help desks and facilitating interactions between rights holders and service providers, have proven to be effective in providing immediate legal services. Affirmative legal education and community engagement initiatives empower marginalized groups but require continuous adaptation, effective coordination and broad-based partnerships.

In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, strengthened collaboration among judicial actors, alternative dispute resolution (ADR) actors, civil society consultation frameworks and local peace actors (ALP, peace mediators), fostered better understanding and complementarity between ADR mechanisms and the formal justice system. In Guinea-Bissau, involving magistrates operating in rural areas in the Mobile Justice campaign proved to be a successful strategy for highlighting the challenges people face in accessing justice. UNDP’s initiative raised the magistrates’ awareness of people’s challenges and provided lessons that can be applied to improve their services.

In Nepal, legal awareness programs and partnerships with local governments have been instrumental in effectively addressing community-level justice issues. By combining community actors’ knowledge with the support and resources of local governments, communities can better handle legal challenges, leading to more just and equitable societies. This collaborative approach not only resolves immediate issues but also establishes a foundation for long-term justice and empowerment within communities.

Incorporating human rights-based approaches in justice services in collaboration with national and local actors helps improve access to justice of the most vulnerable and marginalized. In Guatemala, UNDP developed participatory processes jointly with the Secretariat of Indigenous Peoples that have influenced the institutional vision of youth as promoters of peace, emphasizing the importance of a people-centred approach and applying an intersectional focus with particular priority on Indigenous youth and women. These advances are fostering the creation of enabling spaces for Maya youth within the Judicial Branch, building bridges to help address barriers to accessing justice. UNDP’s work in Bhutan and Viet Nam also emphasizes the complementarity of these approaches with the principle of “leaving no one behind”, and includes interventions with girls with disabilities, youth, rural communities and Indigenous Peoples.

In Yemen, UNDP places utmost importance in the promotion of inclusion within community-based structures. The focus on vulnerable and marginalized groups aims to ensure the plurality of voices and agencies, which in turn strengthens accountability at the local level. The Global Programme-catalysed partnership between UNDP and UNICEF in Yemen helped assess and address the needs of women detainees and children who stay with them in the Sana’a Central Prison. Despite its limited scale and pilot scope, it is a significant step forward in addressing the interpenetration between protection and health for detainees, which is considered one of the weakest links in the justice service continuum. At the end of the joint intervention, UNDP and UNICEF teams concluded that the multifaceted challenges at the prison require an integrated response across a wide spectrum of partners, including coordination and collaboration among justice and non-justice professionals, decision-makers and service providers, authorities and communities.

The Universal Periodic Review (UPR) can serve as a practical entry point for governments and stakeholders to leverage human rights recommendations to strengthen national development policy and integrated programming. As a peer-to-peer mechanism rooted in voluntary engagement and constructive dialogue, the UPR provides a unique space to address cultural norms, promote inclusive participation, and identify strategic programming opportunities. For example, Bolivia used UPR recommendations to incorporate environmental governance into national planning, particularly in relation to mining and lithium extraction. Advanced tools such as SIMAT and the Landscape Lithium System, powered by AI, were used to model environmental risks and inform preventive policymaking. UNDP’s UPR+ initiative builds on this potential by demonstrating how the UPR can act as a catalyst for rights-based sustainable development, while supporting national ownership and fostering strategic engagement with donors and development partners, promote national ownership and strategic engagement by donors and partners.

Lesson 2

Active and inclusive community engagement fosters trust, ownership and co-creation to meet people’s justice and security needs.

Community engagement emerged as essential for project success in countries such as Côte d’Ivoire, Fiji and Guatemala, illustrating the importance of bottom-up approaches and engaging beneficiaries early to ensure buy-in. Doing so not only increases the chances of project success but creates potential and opportunities for sustainability and scalability of results.

In Guinea-Bissau, direct involvement of community leaders and traditional authorities in the delivery of mobile justice services built trust within remote communities and increased local ownership of the project, ensuring the sustainability of legal services. By integrating traditional authorities with formal legal frameworks, the project successfully navigated cultural sensitivities, enhancing the impact and reach of its interventions.

In Albania, civil society-led dialogue between marginalized communities including low-income individuals, gender-based violence survivors, persons with disabilities, Roma and Egyptian communities, as well as local public service providers, facilitated access to legal aid and public services and fostered a greater trust in the institutions.

In Nepal, innovative communication strategies, such as media mobilization, radio programmes and the use of local languages, are crucial for educating local communities, particularly in areas with low literacy rates. Awareness programs broadcasted through local FM stations and the distribution of posters and pamphlets in local languages help enhance awareness among community members on issues like vital registration, civic documentation, child marriage, gender-based violence and caste discrimination.

Bottom-up approaches enable voices from the communities that have rarely fed into security sector development. In Somalia, UNDP supported new approaches to policing through piloting important consultations and assessments that created the conditions for a more people-centred approach to security. Through co-creation and co-design, the national and local institutions took leadership and increased their ambitions. Community dialogue and consultations are vital in Somalia’s society to bring about collaborative approaches where communities are taken seriously and have a voice. Communities are willing to engage with authorities and tackle difficult questions. Cross state collaboration on technical issues is gradually building trust between actors in the security institutions. UNDP has been instrumental in bringing together Federal level representatives and Federal Member States (FMS) representatives in relation to community assessments but also in the programme/project formation. The group of actors are now frequently consulting each other and are working in more collaborative way.

Lesson 3

Overcoming gender and social inclusion barriers for justice and security requires context- and culturally- sensitive strategies.

Empowering women is a long-term agenda of social transformation. It entails addressing the complex interplay of institutional, cultural, economic and political factors through which women are discriminated.

The experience in Bangladesh demonstrates that overcoming gender barriers to access justice and security requires culturally sensitive strategies. Specifically, the Community Safety, Peaceful Coexistence and Access to Justice Project (CSPC), supported by the Global Programme, mandates at least 40 percent female participation in every initiative, while also prioritizing the involvement of ethnic minorities, youth and persons with disabilities to ensure inclusivity. This commitment is evident in activities such as the development of Community Safety Plans (CSPs) and the formation of mediation forums, where community members are not just participants but also decision-makers in the processes that affect their lives. Although women showed initial interest during consultations, their involvement was limited during implementation (26 percent). The initial reluctance of women to participate was due to cultural norms and gender dynamics. To overcome the cultural barrier, the project adopted tailored strategies to involve male leaders and influential persons of the community such as religious leaders, schoolteachers, community leaders and influential women leaders to advocate for women’s participation. This culturally sensitive strategy led to increased female involvement, resulting in the successful inclusion of 45 women mediators who underwent specialized training in gender-based violence. This initiative strengthened women's roles in community dispute resolution and gender-based violence prevention efforts, promoting gender-responsive mediation practices within the community.

In Southeast Asia, a key lesson learned from UNDP’s support to women leadership in the judicial system is that capacity building programmes for women need to be determined by ‘what works’ in specific contexts. For training with women judges, it needs to be demand driven. Programmess that adapt to the evolving needs of justice actors – through peer learning, on-the-job coaching and modular training – are more impactful. For instance, blending legal content with leadership, ethics and digital literacy can build a more holistic capacity

Culturally sensitive strategies also require understanding of cultural norms and a tailored approach and strategy to address them. In Fiji, the Global Programme supported a human rights-red approach within the Fiji Police Force, shifting from a "warrior" to a "guardian" mindset in policing. This included reforms in community policing strategies, emphasizing respect for human dignity and building trust within communities. The inclusion of both traditional and non-traditional community actors, such as Turaga Ni Koro, women, youth and faith-based organizations, further enhanced community relations and policing effectiveness. In Cuba, an important lesson learned from interventions addressing toxic masculinities is that progress towards gender equality and the fight against harmful masculinities can be sustainable only if individual transformation is followed by changes in the broader environment (families, workplaces, communities).

In Malawi, UNDP supported the institutional strengthening of the Malawi Human Rights Commission including the development and launch of a Gender-Sensitive Strategic Plan (2024-2028) which results in the adoption of measures regarding the promotion and protection of human rights of vulnerable groups and key populations. Through UNDP support to the Malawi Human Rights Commission, training took place of 40 (30 male and 10 female) officers from the Malawi Police Services and Judiciary on child justice competencies. The training capacitated the court users to deliver quality, rights-based, age and gender sensitive public services at local levels and imparted skills to enable court users to effectively handle gender and childrelated cases in accordance with the law. In Ecuador, collaboration with the Ombudsperson Office has focused on protecting the rights of people in human mobility situations and promoting gender equality and social inclusion, enabling more effective handling of human rights violations with an inclusive and genderfocused approach.

Lesson 4

Integrated approach, cross-sectoral partnerships and local actor empowerment remain essential to safeguarding the rights to a healthy environment.

Experience across the regions confirms the need for an integrated and rights-based approaches to environmental justice. In Asia-Pacific, the Regional Conference on Achieving Just Societies highlighted that environmental and human rights protections must be embedded within justice frameworks, particularly in the Pacific, where climate displacement and resource exploitation pose severe risks to fundamental rights. In the Arab States, the Regional Hub’s Rule of Law and Conflict Prevention units co-organized a side event at COP16 in Riyadh, in collaboration with the Environment team, focusing on natural resources. The event proposed an integrated approach to environmental justice and climate security, highlighting how programming on the right to a healthy environment can contribute to conflict prevention and peacebuilding. This approach is now being formalized through the development of a regional, cross-sectoral framework on climate security.

At the country level, UNDP’s work in Georgia and Moldova shows that integrated and inclusive approaches to green transition, which incorporate human rights and gender perspectives, remain essential. Equally important is to continue working with the national human rights institutions (NHRIs) to better implement the right to a healthy environment. In Angola and Zambia, environmental justice programming demonstrated the importance of locally rooted strategies tailored to specific contexts in applying integrated approaches. In Lebanon, environmental justice programming owes its success to the well-established partnership between UNDP, the Ministry of Environment and the Ministry of Justice. Through facilitating collaboration between the ministries, UNDP established a platform for exchanging insights on the challenges that hinder the implementation of environmental laws. This collaborative approach has led to the development of concrete solutions.

In North Macedonia, interventions for advancing environmental justice provided valuable insights into the critical role of investing in training and empowering local actors, such as the Ombudsperson's Office, civil society organizations and municipal authorities, for enhanced long-term ownership and trengthened institutional responses to environmental justice challenges. This not only improved the immediate effectiveness of interventions but also built a foundation for continued advocacy and action beyond the project’s duration. Continuous engagement with government stakeholders and the judiciary and open dialogue with relevant institutions to address bureaucratic obstacles and enhance policy enforcement mechanisms helped successfully elevate environmental justice as a national priority, embedding it within legal and institutional frameworks. Further, regional cooperation and knowledge sharing in advancing environmental justice and facilitation of cross-country exchanges, such as the drafting session in Montenegro, underscored the benefits of collaborative efforts in tackling shared environmental governance challenges.

For environmental justice, capacity support to affected communities through legal information and representation is necessary to ensure accountability for perpetrators of environmental injustices and remedies for affected rights holders. UNDP has conducted detailed assessments of the barriers people face in accessing environmental justice in Georgia and Pakistan, with ongoing assessments in North Macedonia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, a targeted assessment of the environmental justice needs of judges in Southeast Asia, and a broader independent evaluation of UNDP’s environmental justice programming. The findings are consistent across these assessments, capacitated justice actors and environmental agencies are ineffective unless communities and rights holders are informed and empowered to access environmental justice and secure their own rights.

Lesson 5

In conflict and crisis settings, enhancing institutional continuity and resilience vis-à-vis complex and changing legal needs and utilizing customary practices can contribute to justice delivery for affected populations.

Sustained, targeted support for victims and survivors remains essential for fostering people-centred justice. In Lebanon, lessons learned from the 2006 conflict highlighted the importance of addressing specific legal issues that arise from conflicts and are associated with forced displacements. UNDP is ensuring that legal helpdesks are equipped to handle matters related to displacement, including rental and employment disputes, insurance, estate ownership, civil registration and discriminatory practices. UNDP’s experience in transitional justice highlights the need for institutionalized gender-sensitive frameworks, enhanced victim participation and robust national mechanisms to ensure justice and reconciliation.

In Ukraine, Strengthening the Free Legal Aid System (FLAS) has been essential in addressing the complex legal challenges faced by war-affected populations. Increased demand for professional legal assistance highlights the need for specialized training in communication, psychosocial support and legal aspects of wartime realities. Institutional reforms, competency-based training and standardized methodologies have improved service quality and ensured sustainability. Continuous learning and quality monitoring have strengthened FLAS’s capacity to adapt to evolving legal needs. Enhancing the professional competencies of FLAS lawyers has directly improved service quality, allowing for more effective and responsive legal aid delivery. 

The efficiency of human rights protections and access to justice relies on continuous institutional resilience. Thus, institutional support to the National Human Rights Institution - the Ombudsperson’s Office, expanding its regional network, enhanced human rights monitoring, advocacy and legal aid accessibility, particularly in war-affected areas, results in better awareness of the institution and improved Ombudsperson’s Office capability to effectively address human rights challenges and reach people in need, even in remote areas. Adaptive management is required to continue to provide strategic support to key institutions during crisis and conflict. A capacity assessment of the Ombudspersons’ Office led by UNDP, OHCHR and the Regional Network of European NHRIs, allowed for an operational plan to support the Office adapt to the crisis context and provide ongoing support with new operational models and core functions in challenging contexts.

Integration of people-centred approaches in justice and legal aid systems help to improve procedural standards and ensure better support to survivors avoiding retraumatization. Moreover, such approaches are critical to ensure correspondence with international humanitarian law and international criminal law standards and principles in the process of investigation of war crimes. In this regard, capacity development initiatives for law enforcement are crucial in fostering a more responsive and accountable system compliant with international principles. Strengthening responsible business practices has been instrumental in promoting human rights compliance in the private sector. Through training, policy support and self-assessment tools, businesses have been encouraged to implement human rights due diligence, fostering a more ethical and sustainable economic environment, particularly in conflict settings.

Lesson 6

Digitalization can provide solutions to accessibility and inclusion of justice and security services and enhance data-driven advocacy, but requires additional capacity strengthening for rights-based digital transformation.

Innovation is the cornerstone of transforming the security and justice sectors as a catalyst for safer, fairer and more inclusive societies. To meet the challenges of today’s deeply polarized world and increasingly complex conflicts, justice and security programming must champion bold, unconventional solutions, fostering dynamic partnerships and harnessing the expertise of diverse stakeholders. Prioritizing cutting-edge, people-centred approaches can help ensure that security and justice systems are not only effective but also equitable, resilient and responsive to the needs of the communities they serve.

In Kenya, close collaboration with the Judiciary, particularly in the development of the Small Claims Court (SCC) mobile application and the facilitation of the SCC Adjudicators Symposium, ensured that the digital solutions were well-aligned with the needs of judicial officers and the public. Moreover, engagement with women-led and women-based organizations through targeted forums provided an inclusive platform to address barriers to justice, especially for marginalized groups like women traders. This co-design approach, involving stakeholders in the development of interventions, fostered ownership and sustainability of project outcomes, ensuring that the tools and knowledge shared would have a lasting impact on access to justice. A key lesson learned from the project was the importance of addressing capacity gaps early in the implementation phase. Initial delays occurred due to lengthy engagements with stakeholders, particularly in developing the Terms of Reference for the SCC mobile application and digital training content. To avoid such challenges in future projects, conducting early-stage capacity assessments and streamlining engagement processes will be critical to ensuring alignment among partners from the start.

In Palestine, one key lesson from the implementation of the Mizan court management system is the value of digital innovation in enhancing access to justice in challenging contexts. In settings where movement restrictions limit physical access to courts, Mizan enabled remote case management and judicial processes, ensuring service continuity. The digitization of legal documents improved efficiency, transparency and accessibility across the justice system.

In Albania, the conceptualization of a web-based database and platform to streamline access to legal aid services, while still in validation, has already highlighted the importance of digital solutions in enhancing accessibility to fundamental services. This initiative encourages ongoing dialogue about the role of technology in expanding legal aid support and enhancing digital skills of public institutions and vulnerable populations. Further, the experience in Moldova showcased that institutionalization and adoption by state stakeholders of digital tools, such as the legal tele-assistance platform and multilingual chatbot, require robust infrastructure and stakeholder engagement for effective use and periodic updates to address both the infrastructure developments as well as the changes in the context and normative framework.

For community security, the Social Tension Monitoring Mechanism (STMM) in Moldova is an innovative tool (first introduced by UNDP in 2023) designed to monitor social tensions and provide critical data to central and local authorities, as well as other stakeholders, on dimensions of social tensions that could erode social cohesion, with a particular focus on both inside community and inter-community tensions. Piloting the STMM highlighted the value of comprehensive data collection, effective team coordination, timely dialogues and the necessity of concrete incentives and support for sustained Community Security Councils participation, alongside the importance of capacity building to operationalize social tension data.

Beyond better utilizing digital tools to deliver justice and security solutions, embracing digital transformation also entails addressing the justice and security challenges technology exacerbates and safeguarding a safe and inclusive digital space. Training sessions on preventing and combating technology-facilitated gender-based violence (TF-GBV) which was led by Korean National Policy Academy (KNPA) experts with support of the Global Programme, emphasized survivor-centred approaches and effectively inspired national partners to create localized police training curricula. In certain instances, this resulted in significant institutional reforms that ensured sustained national-level commitment to TF-GBV. Awareness campaigns were instrumental in engaging youth, equipping them with essential knowledge and referral systems. The implementation of localized monitoring tools, such as eMonitor+, fostered multi-sectoral collaboration and peer-to-peer knowledge sharing, while also supporting evidence-based policy decisions. These advancements paved the way for sustainable capacity-building and strengthened partnerships. However, resource and capacity limitations among UNDP Country Offices and national partners remain a challenge. Continued efforts to facilitate peer-to-peer knowledge sharing and inclusive stakeholder engagement will be crucial to address these gaps effectively.

In Nigeria, UNDP supported the Nigerian Human Rights Commission to develop a Human Rights Dashboard where it is able to process complaints from all 36 states and release monthly reports on human rights trends, improving transparency and evidence-based policy making. This data-driven approach has strengthened institutional accountability and enhanced public trust in human rights protection mechanisms.

Rights-based approaches must be applied to digital transformation. The piloting phase in Colombia, Lebanon, Mauritania, North Macedonia and Samoa provided valuable insights into both the strengths and areas for improvement, including the importance of mainstreaming gender considerations in rights-based digital transformation to address the digital divide and the critical importance of qualitative data to represent the reality of experiences of users of digital services. Several pilot countries emphasized the need for greater contextualization of data and stronger engagement with local expertise to ensure that the findings are both relevant and actionable.

Lesson 7

Regional networks and platforms are important channels for strengthening the capacities of national human rights institutions and instrumental for advancing critical conversations on human rights.

In the context of increasing challenges to human rights, and particularly within fragile and crisis settings, the role of national human rights institutions (NHRIs) can be critical for prevention and early warning. UNDP has strategically used regional platforms and collaborated with regional networks to strengthen the capacities of NHRIs, including on topics of growing importance, such as the right to a healthy environment and on business and human rights.

In Eastern Europe/the Balkans, UNDP, in collaboration with OHCHR and the European Network of NHRIs improved NHRI capabilities to monitor and address environmental rights violations. The support also helped advance the regional network of the NHRIs in the area of environment and human rights. A mentorship programme was implemented to enable Ombudsperson staff to handle environmental justice cases more effectively. Partnerships with civil society organizations (CSOs) were formalized to improve cooperation in the prosecution of environmental justice violations.

In the Arab States, UNDP hosted the Inaugural Dialogue on Business and Human Rights in the Arab States Region in Doha, in collaboration with the Qatar National Human Right Commission, the Arab Network of National Human Rights Institutions and UN agencies. Attended by over 300 stakeholders, the event focused on addressing challenges and promoting responsible business practices through the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs). The dialogue raised awareness, established a network of engaged parties and culminated in the adoption of the Doha Declaration.

With support from the Global Programme, a regional Business and Human Rights strategy was developed to enable programming across diverse political and economic contexts. In line with the proposed strategy, the Global Programme provided technical assistance to the NHRIs in Bahrain and Djibouti, focusing on the practical implementation of the UNGPs.

In Africa, regional platforms such as the African Business and Human Rights Forum, the Regional Transitional Justice Forum, and similar dialogues were instrumental in advancing critical conversations. These spaces provide opportunities to build consensus, foster partnerships and amplify the voices of diverse stakeholders, ensuring inclusive and people-centred approaches to justice and human rights.