The anniversary, and the speaker who declined to celebrate it on the terms offered
The last hour of HLPF 2026 belonged to UN Women, marking 15 years of the Safe Cities and Safe Public Spaces Global Initiative: five founding city programmes in 2011, 75 cities in 36 countries today. The framing from the podium was multi-stakeholder partnership, and it was earned. The initiative has moved laws in some 25 countries and rewired transport, lighting and market design in cities from Quito to Dakar to Madrid.
The sharpest speaker in the room was the one the model exists to serve. And her argument was that the partnership everyone was congratulating is, in its own grammar and its own accounting, still extractive.
The refusal of the testimony slot
The Huairou Commission’s Africa regional representative was in the room as a grassroots leader, the role that at events like this one usually comes with a testimony slot. She declined it while standing in it, and named the distinction the rest of the session never quite addressed.
The success she came to report is a piece of infrastructure her members built themselves. Women in Kakamega County who lose a husband are frequently pushed off the land, and the window to intervene is days, not months: report late and the land is already sold. Her network built a toll-free reporting line, Haki Ardhi, that a woman can use without paying and without being seen using it. The alert reaches a paralegal’s phone; the paralegal, rather than the widow, is the one who walks into the chief’s office or the police station. Over two years the network logged 600 land cases and closed 312 of them successfully, mostly through elders and chiefs rather than the courts, because, as she put it, court is expensive.
The tool also does something a testimony slot cannot: it aggregates. Which women are being dispossessed, at what age, in which locations, and which institutions answer the phone when called, all of it becomes a trend line the network takes into meetings with chiefs and the county government. That is accountability built from the bottom by the people being counted, which is the thing the Forum spends a week asking member states to do from the top.
Who is paying for the model
Then came the accounting, and it is the reason the anniversary should be read with some discomfort. The paralegals holding up this system are survivors of the same dispossession, which is precisely why the women they visit will open the door to them. They are not on a payroll.
Read that next to the room’s vocabulary of partnership and the arithmetic is plain. Unpaid labour by women who have themselves been dispossessed is a subsidy, and it is currently load-bearing. Her definition of capacity-building was correspondingly unsentimental: strengthening capacity means resourcing what women are already doing and compensating them for it, not training them to do more of it for nothing. The one thing that visibly changed the outcome of those cases, she said, was a partner think tank paying for a lawyer to sit in her office for a year.
Her second charge was against the shape of the funding rather than its size.
This is a measurement point as much as a financing one. A cycle short enough to fit a reporting deadline cannot generate a learning curve. It can only generate a result.
Bolivia: not a system that fails, a system that does not see
Eliana Quiroz, of the Internet Bolivia Foundation, supplied the structural half of the argument. Online violence is not a separate problem from street violence, she argued, but the same root causes in a medium that multiplies them: one man harassing one woman on the street becomes a hundred men harassing her online, and the image, once altered and shared, cannot be recalled by anyone.
The failure she described is not enforcement. It is perception.
Impunity presumes an offence the institution recognises and declines to act on. What she is describing is prior to that: a harm the institution does not register as a harm, and therefore never budgets against, never counts, and never appears to be failing at. She added the harder layer, that women subjected to it often do not know they are being violated either. Bolivia is now debating a law on digital violence, and her closing point was directed at the room: the duty is the state’s, not the NGOs’, and the institutions asked to implement it need funding too, at a moment when funding is going away.
Tanzania: the market as the unit of analysis
The evidence that the model does work, given a decade, came from Equality for Growth, which ran a market-safety programme in Tanzania where the informal economy is the primary driver of employment, accounting for 71.8% of all workers by the organisation’s figure. The first lesson was a warning against the intuitive fix.
What worked was the whole stack at once: market committees, municipal councils, survivor-centred services, continuous public education for the new traders arriving daily, supportive policy and legal empowerment. The organisation reported gender-based violence prevalence in the markets falling from 96%, effectively every woman trading, to between zero and 15% depending on the market. A market committee of twelve members, all of them men, was the regional norm; women began contesting for the seats and one was elected the first woman chair. The women who followed her in then changed the agenda, demanding toilets and childcare facilities. Tanzania now has a national guideline on ending violence against women in public spaces that reaches beyond markets to mining sites, transport, fisheries and leisure areas, and the government has taken the programme over. That is the localisation story the session was built to tell, and it took ten years and sustained donor investment to produce.
The mayor, and the line that anchored the room
San Miguelito is Panama’s second city and its densest district, first in the country for domestic violence and for teenage pregnancy. Its mayor, two years into the job, made the case for why women in decision-making seats is a measurement argument and not a courtesy.
Her point was that lived experience is a detection instrument: as mayor she can “make visible problems that are invisible for people that do not live these kind of problems.” Half her municipal workforce is women; urban planning, municipal engineering and the environmental directorate are all led by women. And her most interesting move was to refuse the infrastructure-only definition of safety. Sidewalks, lighting and bus stops are necessary, she said, but San Miguelito’s safety strategy runs through a care system: a municipal mental health clinic, a soup kitchen, three municipal daycare centres. Unpaid care work is what strips a woman of the time to work, to study, to be independent, and even, she noted, to get help when she experiences violence. Autonomy is the safety intervention.
Spain, the EU and UN Women filled in the institutional frame around this. Spain argued that a city a woman cannot walk through freely is not primarily a security problem but a barrier to education, employment, political participation and economic autonomy, and announced new funding for the initiative. The EU delegation named the mechanism directly: violence against women online and offline “is often perpetrated with a specific purpose to intimidate women and keep them out of the public space and from leadership roles,” and pointed to an 8 million euro project in Tanzania and support for essential services in Bolivia. UN Women’s Deputy Executive Director, who was at Beijing and at Huairou herself, closed the anniversary with the joke that carried the sting: 15 is the age of assertiveness, and “15 years is also the year you can throw tantrums.”
Our read
Every speaker in this room endorsed multi-stakeholder partnership, and the record supports them: five cities to 75, laws in 25 countries, prevalence in Tanzanian markets falling by most of its starting value. The awkwardness is that the session’s own evidence describes a model whose frontline is staffed by unpaid survivors paying their own bus fare, and whose funding arrives in cycles too short to learn from. Both things are true at once, and the second is not a footnote to the first. It is how the first is financed.
Put the Bolivian point beside it and the counting problem sharpens. Institutions that do not perceive digital violence as a problem will never produce a statistic showing they are failing at it, because the absence of a count is the form the failure takes. The same logic runs through the grassroots critique: unpaid labour is not underfunded in any ledger, it is simply absent from the ledger. Both are gaps that look like zeroes.
The Haki Ardhi line is the sharpest thing the session produced, and not because it is a nice tool. It is an accountability system designed by the women being counted, and it does exactly what the localisation agenda claims to want: it generates trend data, names which institutions respond, and carries that to the county government. It also runs on donated labour. The question the anniversary leaves open is whether the fifteenth year is when the model starts paying for the thing holding it up, or whether the celebration is itself part of how the bill keeps not arriving.
Why it matters for the SDGs
This sits on SDG 5 and SDG 11, and specifically on target 11.7, safe and inclusive public spaces, whose indicator 11.7.2 on physical and sexual harassment is one of the framework’s sparsest for country coverage. It reaches SDG 16 through access to justice, which the paralegals were substituting for at their own expense, and SDG 8 through the informal market workers whose safety and income turn out to be the same variable. The measurement stake is the one the session kept circling without naming: the indicator framework counts programmes and cities, and does not count the unpaid grassroots labour that those programmes rest on, or the digital violence that no institution in the chain yet perceives as a problem. With the post-2030 framework now being negotiated, both are candidates to be written in or, again, left out.
Watch & read
- Full session recording, UN Web TV.
- Safe Cities and Safe Public Spaces, UN Women, the global initiative marking its 15th year.
- Huairou Commission and its Governing Council · Haki Ardhi, the women’s land-rights reporting tool described from the panel.
- Internet Bolivia Foundation · Equality for Growth, Tanzania.
- The Forum’s in-depth review of SDG 11 · Cities that work for people, the parallel argument about who infrastructure is built for · Counting women into SDG 7, on what a goal cannot see · Full HLPF 2026 coverage.
Quotations are lightly edited from an automated transcript of the UN Web TV recording and should be read as close paraphrase. Speakers are cited by role or organisation where a name could not be confirmed against an official source. Spain’s intervention was delivered in Spanish and is summarised rather than quoted. Figures are as each speaker or organisation reported them and were not independently verified.