A/HRC/10/43 E/CN.6/2009/10 Standing Committee Sub-Working Group on Gender and Humanitarian Action, the Task Force on Violence against Women established within the Inter-Agency Network on Women and Gender Equality, the Inter-Agency Task Force on Adolescent Girls, and as a member of the six United Nations entities on the highlevel steering committee of the UNite to End Violence Against Women campaign. UNIFEM serves as a lead or partner agency on several joint United Nations initiatives on violence against women, including programmes sponsored by the Millennium Development Goals Achievement Fund of the Government of Spain in Bangladesh, Colombia and Morocco; the Asia Pacific regional joint programme entitled “Partners for prevention: working with boys and men to prevent genderbased violence”; and the One United Nations pilots in Albania, Rwanda and Uruguay. Programming to strengthen community-level initiatives that address violence against women and girls 42. Community-level initiatives to end violence against women and girls are fundamental to effecting sustained change. UNIFEM is strengthening promising initiatives while supporting innovative and emerging areas of programming. For example, in Afghanistan, UNIFEM launched a special fund for the elimination of violence against women and the girl child, providing 10 initial grants to communityled initiatives that are addressing violence against women. Other local initiatives have been supported through the two-year UNIFEM programme funded by the Department for International Development of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, which focuses on community-led responses to peacebuilding and preventing sexual violence in conflict in Afghanistan, Haiti, Liberia, Rwanda, Timor-Leste and Uganda. Building on the promising Safe Cities programme carried out in Latin America in partnership with sister agencies and with the support of the Government of Spain, UNIFEM is launching a pilot Global Safe Cities initiative spanning 8 to 10 geographically representative sites, which will participate in developing a rigorously evaluated global model. Programming to support excluded women, gender equality experts, advocates and their organizations or networks working to end violence against women and girls 43. UNIFEM has consistently maintained strong ties to women’s groups, gender equality experts, human rights organizations and women’s ministries, leveraging their capacities and political influence to sustain public and policy attention on violence against women and to promote implementation and accountability among Government counterparts, civil society organizations and United Nations partners. In Burkina Faso, UNIFEM partnered with the Minister of Women’s Affairs on the conference of First Ladies on cross-border aspects of female genital mutilation, which shared the results of a UNIFEM-sponsored study on the cross-border nature of the practice in six West African countries. UNIFEM has supported a number of initiatives surrounding the post-election violence in Kenya, including collaboration with other United Nations and non-governmental organization partners to produce a rapid assessment of gender-based violence; enhance the ability of the Kenyan Women Lawyers group to respond to rape cases and to develop guidelines for women’s testimony. In select areas of India, UNIFEM has supported the formation of adolescent groups to empower survivors and vulnerable persons to protect themselves against trafficking and violence. In Rwanda, UNIFEM supported the 16 08-66140