Since the establishment of the Regional Emergency GBV Advisors (REGA) structure as an emergency mechanism in 2014, it
has been challenging to ensure the systematic collection and analysis of evidence to assess its impact and relevance -
beyond the number of deployments or the size and composition of the teams. A lack of qualitative evidence for the
sustainability of the deployments measured in the extent to which their work has been capitalised on, replicated and
sustainably absorbed by country offices, field GBV sub-clusters and UNFPA Regional Offices has also been noted. In
addition, the Gender-Based Violence (GBV) expertise gap in operations seems to have grown between 2014 and 2019,
which was reflected by the commitment in the 2019 REGA Letter of Intent to expand the composition of the REGA teams by
adding new areas of GBV expertise (Regional Coordination and Information Management) to provide wider support to
country operations. Nonetheless, there has been little joint analysis of the mechanism’s relevance in the context of more
recent changes in the humanitarian landscape and the global commitments on GBV, protection and gender since 2014, nor
has the mechanism’s ability to build sustainable capacity at a country level been sufficiently analysed to ensure that in the
mid to longer-term operations are not dependant on an emergency mechanism.