A/HRC/13/71 E/CN.6/2010/8 23. The United Nations Trust Fund grant appraisal process actively engages United Nations agencies at the global and subregional levels. In particular, the subregional inter-agency Programme Appraisal Committees make it possible to establish links with existing United Nations efforts and national priorities. This decentralized and broadly participatory structure ensures that funding allocations conform closely to the capacities and needs of diverse countries and regions, thereby promoting the overall relevance of the United Nations Trust Fund to national priorities and contexts. 24. Since 2008, as the resource base has increased, a shift to larger and longerterm grants has allowed for larger-scale interventions that can achieve higher-level results, as well as better sustainability efforts. In 2009, the United Nations Trust Fund has once again been able to offer grants of up to $1 million for two- to threeyear initiatives. This has led to the more efficient use of resources in the administration of the Fund, with the time and labour required to review, approve, monitor and support grantees being more cost-effective in relation to the results and impacts that they can produce. Generating knowledge and developing capacities 25. Some of the most serious constraints in addressing violence against women and girls arise from limited capacities to design, implement and expand programmes, and from a lack of knowledge about what works most effectively. Closing capacity and knowledge gaps is therefore integral to the fulfilment of the mandate of the United Nations Trust Fund, as described in its Monitoring, Evaluation and Knowledge Management Framework 2008-2011. 5 26. In response to those constraints, the United Nations Trust Fund 2009 call for proposals continued to emphasize the need for systematic monitoring and evaluation, and recommended that applicants dedicate 10 per cent of the grants requested to evaluation and an additional 3 to 5 per cent to monitoring. Shortlisted concept notes and full-fledged proposals were given thorough feedback in order to encourage applicants to strive for higher-level impacts by rooting programmes in solid evidence and linking them to the achievement of targeted results, guided by monitoring, evaluation, documentation and knowledge-sharing plans. 27. Particularly noteworthy is the fact that, in 2009, the United Nations Trust Fund made significant progress in establishing a new grantee reporting system designed to capture results, learning and knowledge, and analyse trends, across the entire grant-making portfolio. The comprehensive database reporting system, which will be tied to a results-based framework for the United Nations Trust Fund under its forthcoming new strategy, will be launched in 2010. It is expected to greatly facilitate robust reporting on and dissemination of emerging practices and knowledge to policymakers and practitioners. Case studies of grantees’ promising and good practices are also under development, and evaluation reports, training manuals and other tools produced by grantees are being compiled in order to enrich the database for global knowledge-sharing. Moreover, the United Nations Trust Fund was able to increase the degree and the quality of its grantee monitoring. This included select monitoring visits carried out in 2009 by the United Nations Trust __________________ 5 10 See http://www.unifem.org/materials/item_detail.php?ProductID=153. 09-65802