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UN for Men Too · article

Follow the money

Of every dollar that reaches a man as the person being helped, seventy-nine cents pays for a circumcision. We had to count it by hand, because nobody else ever has.

Somewhere a civil servant ticks a box, and that box decides whether the world can ever find out where the money went. There are eleven boxes. Climate has one. Biodiversity has one. Disability has one. Maternal health has one. There is no box for men. So we counted by hand instead: thirty-five thousand aid records, three hundred and seventy-eight that name men or boys, every one read. What came back was not what we expected, and one number in it stops you dead.

01

The box that does not exist

Everything follows from a tick in a spreadsheet, and from one that is never made.

Money does not become countable by itself. Somebody has to decide it is worth counting.

When a government reports an aid project, it fills in a form. On that form is a row of boxes, one for each thing the world has agreed to keep track of. Tick the box and the project joins a total. Leave it and the project vanishes into an average.

Here is every box.

Everything the aid system has agreed to count

The DAC policy markers, pulled from the OECD's own machine rather than from a page describing them. Gender equality is absent from this list only because it is the flagship and has a dataflow of its own.

  • Climate and environment5

    five markers

  • Governance1

  • Nutrition1

  • Disaster risk reduction1

  • Disability1

    a characteristic, not a sector

  • Reproductive, maternal, newborn and child health1

    maternal core is sex-specific

  • Gender equality1

    own dataflow, $71.8bn a year

  • Men and boysno box exists

OECD DAC policy marker codelist, CL_CRS_MARKER

Look at the last two before the empty one. Disability is not a sector. It is a characteristic that cuts across every sector, exactly as sex does, and somebody argued it into a box in 2018. The reproductive, maternal, newborn and child health marker is not neutral. Its maternal core is about one sex, it is not framed as anybody's oppression, and it has a box, a custodian and an annual figure.

So the two objections always made against counting men are already dead. Not a sector. Not without calling it oppression. Both are answered by boxes that already exist.

The same six boxes, and who ticks them

Every donor reporting to the OECD fills in the same form. This is what they did with it in 2022: which boxes they used, how much moved through each one, and where each country sits. The last row is the one with no box.

Each dot is one of the 33 donors reporting to the OECD. Filled means that donor marked at least some aid for that objective in 2022. Hover a dot for the country. The last row is dashed all the way across, because there is no box to tick.

  • Gender equality33 of 33

  • Governance29 of 33

  • Disability22 of 33

  • Nutrition28 of 33

  • Maternal and newborn health30 of 33

  • Disaster risk reduction30 of 33

  • Men and boysno marker

    No marker exists, so no donor can mark aid for it and no figure can be produced. This is an absence in the instrument, not a measured zero.

OECD SDMX, OECD.DCD.FSD, dataflows DSD_GNDR@DF_GENDER and DSD_OTHMRKR@DF_OTHERMARKERS. millions of USD, commitments, current prices, 1000 (all sectors), DPGC (developing countries), 2022. the exact query that produced this.

This campaign is run from Norway and Denmark, so it is worth being exact about them. In 2022 Norway marked USD 1,193 million of its aid for gender equality, and Denmark marked USD 411 million. Both used every one of the six markers charted here, and the DAC operates eleven in all. Norway’s smallest was nutrition, at USD 0.7 million, an amount the system still thought worth counting on its own. Neither country used a twelfth, because there is no twelfth to use.

What is missing is not a principle. It is a tick.

And the consequence is worth saying slowly, because it is easy to get wrong and we have got it wrong here before. The money spent on men and boys is not zero. It is unmeasurable. No question on any form produces the figure, so nobody, in either direction, can tell you what it is. Not us. Not the OECD. Not the people who would like the answer to be reassuring.

02

So we counted them by hand

Thirty-five thousand records. It took an afternoon, and as far as we can find it has never been done.

If no total exists, there is one alternative left, which is to stop asking the system and go and read the projects.

Aid activities are published individually, with titles and descriptions, in a standard called IATI. You can search them. So we swept thirty-five thousand of them.

Before reading a word, we wrote down what we expected to find and committed it, so that the data could contradict us. The expectation: that most money naming men treats them as a route to somebody else's outcome. Engaging men as allies. Male involvement in maternal health. Working with men to prevent violence against women. Good work, most of it, and a different thing from work aimed at the man himself.

Then the reading, which is where it got strange.

Searching for the word men returns projects about WOMEN, DEVELOPMENT, MANAGEMENT and EMPLOYMENT. The first test query returned something called PPI Development as its top hit. Searching descriptions instead of titles returned a project called Empowerment of women as male-specific.

And a third of everything that survived was noise of a very particular kind. Greater Malé Waste-to-Energy, because Malé is the capital of the Maldives. Male elephants of the Makgadikgadi. Thermosensitive Genic Male Sterility, which is a rice hybridisation technique. And roughly fifty Catholic missionary orders: the Columban Fathers, the Marist Fathers, the Augustinian Fathers, the Rosminian Fathers.

Anyone who counted projects about fathers without reading them would have published a number that was mostly priests.

378 aid activities that name men or boys

What was left after word-boundary matching on titles, deduplication, and reading every one against rules written before the data was opened.

  • Incidental140

  • Beneficiary139

    the work is for him

  • Instrument70

    a route to someone else

  • Unclear27

  • Both2

Every row published at research/iati-classified.json, so any single call can be disputed

Our hypothesis was wrong. Beneficiary outnumbers instrument, two to one. We had expected the opposite, we had written it down, and the data said no.

That is the finding, and it is published as the finding. Then we weighted it by money, and the article changed again.

03

Seventy-nine cents in the dollar

The number that stopped the work for an hour.

Counting projects treats a five thousand dollar charity appeal and a ten million dollar programme as one each. So we added the money.

By money, the beneficiary column is enormous: eighty-two per cent of everything. Which looked like good news for about ten minutes.

Then we looked at what was in it.

The money that reaches men as the people being helped

Commitments in the sampled activities, currency-corrected. Two bars. One of them is a single procedure.

  • Circumcision for HIV prevention$336m

    one programme type

  • Everything else combined$87m

    schools, victims, health, work

Classified IATI activities, published in full

Of every dollar that reaches a man as the person being helped, seventy-nine cents pays for a circumcision.

Everything else men receive, in the whole sample, put together, is the smaller bar. Boys' schools. Street children. Male victims of trafficking. Suicide prevention. Vocational training. Men's health clinics. All of it, added up, is a fifth of the money that goes on one operation.

Now the part that has to be got right, and where the first version of this article was wrong. These programmes pay for the operation to be performed. The activity titles say so plainly: service delivery, provision, scaling up, expanded access, saturation. Nobody is being protected from a procedure here. The money buys the procedure, at scale, and two of the twenty-five include early infant circumcision. Their stated purpose, in their own titles, is HIV prevention.

Whether that is the right intervention is genuinely contested, and this site is not going to settle it in a paragraph about aid budgets. An earlier version of this article stated an effectiveness figure that was not in our register and had no source attached, which is exactly the failure this whole project is built to avoid. It is removed, and the removal is logged. What the money's shape shows does not depend on whether the operation is a good idea.

Both readings are true at once, and that is exactly what makes the bar worth looking at rather than shouting about. The clearest case of the world spending money on a man's body is one where his body was also a route to somebody else's health.

Take circumcision out entirely and the split between using them and helping men is 50.9 to 49.1. A dead heat, which is the third time this data has landed on even once an artefact was removed.

One of those artefacts nearly went to print. The money split read eighty-two per cent until somebody noticed that the dataset's dollar columns are zero for activities denominated in euros, which silently deletes most European donors and most of the engaging-men programming they fund. A campaign that wanted a number rather than an answer could have published that and been believed.

So we broke the beneficiary column open to see what is actually inside it.

What the money on boys and men is for

The 139 activities that treat men or boys as the people being helped, sorted by what the work is. 117 of them report a financial figure; 22 report none.

  • Circumcision for HIV prevention$343m

    29 activities

  • Education and school buildings$55m

    43 activities

  • Health other than HIV$23m

    14 activities

  • Male victims of violence$2m

    8 activities

  • Street children and shelter$0.04m

    8 activities

  • Employment and skills$0.05m

    5 activities

  • Sport and mentoring$0.03m

    5 activities

Classified IATI activities, each row published

Four fifths circumcision, and most of the rest is school buildings. Together those two are ninety-four per cent of everything.

Then look at the bottom of the chart, where the bars stop being visible. Every project in this sample addressing boys and men as victims of sexual violence or trafficking, added together, comes to about two and a quarter million dollars. There are eight of them. The largest is a million. One, called End the Exploitation of Boys in Thailand, carries fifty dollars against its name. Not fifty thousand, and not fifty million. The record gives its currency as US dollars, puts 50 in the disbursement column, and zero in every other money column it has.

Street children, care and shelter: eight activities, thirty-seven thousand dollars between them. Employment and skills: five activities, fifty-four thousand. Sport and mentoring: five activities, twenty-nine thousand.

And then the category that is not small but absent. In three hundred and seventy-eight activities naming boys, two concern justice, detention or gangs. Two. Both are academic studies of gang entry, and neither reports a budget.

That is the same domain as the article this site published a week ago: the one where the UN's own Global Study found that ninety-four per cent of children detained in the administration of justice, armed conflict and national security settings are boys, and that they face discriminatory treatment there.

The finding has been made, by the UN, in writing. In the aid records that follow it, there are two projects.

Two things about that circumcision money are worth knowing, because they change what it is evidence of.

Who pays for it, and where it goes

Every dollar of it comes from two United States agencies, and almost all of it lands in the high-prevalence HIV belt of southern and eastern Africa.

  • USAID$261m

  • US Health and Human Services$75m

  • Every other donor on earthnone

Classified IATI activities, funder field

It is not the world spending on men. It is one country's HIV programme. Lesotho, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Malawi, Eswatini, Mozambique, Tanzania, Botswana, Uganda. Nine countries, one epidemic, one donor.

Which sharpens the finding rather than softening it. Take PEPFAR out, not because it is illegitimate but because it is one country's response to one disease, and what remains as the world's aid to men and boys as beneficiaries is about eighty-seven million dollars, much of it school buildings.

And the smallest entry deserves a correction, because the first version of this article was imprecise about it. End the Exploitation of Boys in Thailand is not a funded programme with a fifty dollar budget. It is a GlobalGiving appeal, and fifty dollars is what the record shows was disbursed to it.

That is arguably worse and it is certainly different. Somebody wrote the appeal. It sits in the same dataset as a ninety million dollar service delivery contract. Beside it, the United States funds Urban Light in northern Thailand, expanding victim services for males trafficked and exploited, at two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, which is the largest single sum in this sample addressed to male victims of exploitation anywhere in the world.

04

What it buys, and what you would fund instead

Four things the money built, described as achievements because that is what they are. Then four questions about the other column, and nobody can answer any of them, including us.

So far this is arithmetic. Here is what it means, which is a different thing, and it is worth slowing down for because the numbers on this page are large enough to stop meaning anything.

Every figure below is real, checked and linked. None of them is an argument that the money was wrongly spent. Read them as descriptions of what an institution can do once it exists.

What the counted money actually buys

Four real commitments, each one the product of somebody having the standing to ask for it.

  • The EU and UN put EUR 500 million into the Spotlight Initiative to eliminate violence against women and girls. It has a name, a secretariat and a reporting cycle.
  • Norway alone commits about NOK 730 million for 2026 to UN Women and UNFPA by the adopted budget, calling them among its most important partners on gender equality. The government's own May announcement said nearly 700 million; its adopted budget prints 40 million more on the UN Women line.
  • UN Women received USD 594.4 million in contributions in 2024 from 177 funding partners.
  • The EU funds the European Institute for Gender Equality, budget EUR 9.4 million in 2024, whose whole job is to know things and publish them.

Now the honest part, and it is the reason this section is not a comparison table. There is nothing on the other side to put beside them. Not a smaller number. No number, because none of those four things has a counterpart whose subject is men and boys, so there is no line item to name.

The closest thing that exists was made by one person. In 2024 Melinda French Gates gave Richard Reeves, founder of the American Institute for Boys and Men, a USD 20 million fund to direct to work on boys and men, as one of twelve leaders each given the same amount to distribute as they saw fit. That is, as far as we can establish, the largest single sum ever directed at this subject, and it came from a private individual rather than any government or institution.

England's first national men's health strategy, published in November 2025, carries GBP 3.6 million over three years for suicide prevention among middle-aged men. That is a real commitment by a real government and it is also, for scale, roughly one forty-eighth, annualised and converted at Norges Bank's rate, of what one Nordic country sends to two UN gender partners each year by its adopted budget.

Those two figures should not be compared and that is exactly the finding. One is an entity's annual funding, the other is a line inside one country's health budget. They are not comparable because there is no counterpart entity to compare with. The absence is not that men's programmes get less. It is that the category of thing you would measure does not exist.

So, four questions, and the point of them is that nobody can answer any of them, including us.

Questions with no answer, which is the answer

If a UN body for men and boys were created tomorrow, its first annual report would have to begin here.

  • How much does the world currently spend on men's and boys' outcomes? Nobody knows. No marker exists that would produce the figure.
  • What would you fund first? You cannot rank what has never been listed, and no institution has ever published the list.
  • What is the right amount? There is no baseline, no trend line and no prior year to compare against.
  • Who would you ask? That is the question this campaign exists because of, and the honest answer today is nobody in particular.

A reader who finds those questions frustrating has understood the article. They are not rhetorical. They are the questions any competent official would have to answer on day one, and the reason none of them can be answered is that day one has never happened.

05

What is missing is not a checkbox

A marker would let somebody count. Except counting was never the job. Reading, commissioning, publishing and answering for the result is the job, and no form has ever done that.

It would be easy to end on the marker. It is the cheapest item, the easiest to defend and the hardest to refuse: a screening question, one column in a form thirty governments already complete, about a number they mostly already hold.

That is not what this campaign is asking for, and treating it as the ask has been a habit worth breaking. A marker counts money and does nothing else. It does not open an eight-hundred-page study. It does not notice that a recommendation naming boys never reached the General Assembly. It does not commission the research that would settle an argument, publish an annual figure anyone is obliged to answer for, or tell a government what to do once the number is in.

Every one of those is done, for women and girls, by an institution. UN Women has a founding resolution, an executive board, a budget, a reporting line to the General Assembly and staff whose job is to know. The marker is one bolt in that machine, and pointing at the bolt while the machine is missing is how a campaign talks itself down to something nobody has to act on.

What exists on one side, and what is missing on the other

Exists for women and girls

  1. 01An entity created by General Assembly resolution, with a mandate naming its subject.
  2. 02A budget and an executive board.
  3. 03A research function, and people whose job it is to know.
  4. 04Indicators in the global framework, each with a custodian agency.
  5. 05Annual reporting that somebody has to answer for.
  6. 06A policy marker donors screen every project against.

Does not exist for men and boys

  • An entity with men and boys as its subject
  • A budget and a board
  • A body that does the reading
  • An indicator with a custodian
  • A reporting duty
  • A marker, so the money can be counted at all

1UN entity whose subject is a sex

0whose subject is the other one

A/RES/64/289 established UN Women in 2010; no counterpart resolution existsunformentoo.org

How a finding becomes an action, and where it stops

Six links. Break any one of them and the rest never happen. Read the top row as the mechanism working, and the bottom row as the same mechanism with its second link missing.

  • Women and girls

    1. 01 A finding is made Research and country reporting
    2. 02 Somebody owns it UN Women, A/RES/64/289
    3. 03 It gets an indicator SDG 5, custodian agencies
    4. 04 It gets a budget line USD 594.4m in 2024
    5. 05 It is reported annually To the General Assembly
    6. 06 Somebody answers for it Executive board, member states

  • Men and boys

    1. 01 A finding is made UN Global Study, 2019
    2. 02 Somebody owns it nobody
    3. 03 It gets an indicator nobody
    4. 04 It gets a budget line nobody
    5. 05 It is reported annually nobody
    6. 06 Somebody answers for it nobody

    The first link is not weak. Chapter 8 of the Global Study says boys face discriminatory treatment, and its own recommendations name boys four times. The finding was made. It is the second link that is empty, and everything after it is empty because of that.

This is why the ask is an institution rather than a statistic. A number with no owner is link one repeating itself.

Note the order in that column. The marker is last, not first, because it is a consequence rather than a cause. Nothing gets counted until somebody is responsible for counting it, and nobody is responsible until an institution exists to be responsible.

The body is the ask. The rest follows from it.

And the evidence that no such body exists is this article. Somebody had to open the volume, find the sentence that did not travel, sweep thirty-five thousand aid records and read the three hundred and seventy-eight that name men. That work took an afternoon, it is the only classification of its kind we can find, and it was done by a campaign run in somebody's spare time.

Which is the argument, finally, and it was never about money. Measurement decides what a society is able to think about a group. A harm that is counted becomes a problem with a name, a budget and a profession attached to it. A harm that is not counted becomes a private failing, and the people it happens to are read as having brought it on themselves.

What gets counted becomes findable, and what is findable becomes real to whoever is looking.

That is why the campaign is called UN for Men Too, and not a policy marker for men too.

06

Update, 21 August: the machine has now read everything

When this article went to print, we counted by hand. Three days later we had read every project, at every donor, and fifty years back. This is what we found.

7,270 Norwegian aid projects 2023, read in full $11.77bn, every file hashed
0 directed at men's or boys' own outcomes 71 male-naming projects judged one by one; ceiling 23
$61.9M the whole world's beneficiary class for men in grant aid, 106 donors 99.8 percent is one medical procedure from one donor
25% of world aid grants now carry the gender marker 3 percent in 1973-94; the marker born 1997

All documented with method, rules written down and committed before reading, and a ceiling computed against ourselves, in The empty class and the archive.

Norway's principal-marked money 2023, by named channel

Norwegian NGOs $197.3M
UNFPA $98.1M
Other/unspecified $70.7M
UN Women $55.9M
World Food Programme $28.1M
UNICEF $25.3M

From the OECD's own project microdata, swept via the public API and cross-validated against the official bulk file (4.82 vs 4.8 percent principal share). Receipts hashed in the research record.

The absent checkbox this article documented by hand has now been measured mechanically in every direction: across all 106 donors in the official file, in the loans and other flows outside the grants, in seventeen languages of project text, and fifty years back in time. The finding holds everywhere: the marker for one column grew from 3 to 25 percent of world aid; a marker for the other has never existed, and the beneficiary class it would count is empty in Norway and nearly empty in the world. The full ledger, with the four named exceptions the world actually has, stands in The empty class, with receipts anyone can re-hash.

And the money flow at home, which several have asked for on one page: the verified rows so far are the research council's 90 million kroner for women's health research announced in spring 2026, and Oslo municipality's standing grant scheme for equality and women's liberation. The Norad and Bufdir rows are being verified now, and the two-column table in kroner publishes when every row has its primary source, not before.

Ten countries, one method: the scoreboard before the tables

  • Countries read with the same method, every row primary or disprovable with one source: 10
  • Countries where the men's column carries at least one funded, dated row: 6
  • Countries where every men's row reads none found, in the sources' own ink: 4
  • Rows still awaiting a primary source: 0

The six exceptions are the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Germany, Australia, Canada and, since 1 September 2026, Norway, whose zero row fell to this register's own re-audit: grant scheme DT-0853, social meeting places for boys and young men, 9.3 million kroner in 2026, verified against three publishers and corrected as corr-091. Canada's funded row is ten years old. The four none-found columns are Sweden, Finland, Denmark and Iceland, and every one of them can be disproven with a single source; the standing invitation to do so stands at the end of the page.

The kroner table, women's and girls' column: verified rows so far

  • UNFPA, core support 2026 (Ministry of Foreign Affairs): NOK 589.6M
  • UN Women, core support 2026, adopted budget (kap. 164 post 71): NOK 140.3M
  • Research Council, women's health research call 2026: NOK 90M
  • Oslo municipality, equality and women's liberation grants, allocated frame 2026: NOK 4.54M
  • Sum, these verified rows only (adopted budget and award decisions): NOK 824.4M

Sources: the blue book of the adopted 2026 budget (kap. 164 post 71 for UN Women, read 1 September 2026), the government's press release of 13 May 2026 (kept for the UNFPA figure and the visible gap against the budget), forskningsradet.no, oslo.kommune.no (the award decision of 26 February 2026). A sample of verified streams, not a national total; the table grows row by row, and every row requires a primary source.

The men's and boys' column, and the neutral schemes

  • Reform, the resource centre for men: state grants 2026, published as of 30 July: NOK 4.06M
  • Bufdir, family and equality measures, operative 2026 frame (gender-neutral scheme, recipients from both columns): NOK 21.6M
  • IMDi, social meeting places for boys and young men (DT-0853), earmarked by target group, framed as crime prevention, 2026 frame: NOK 9.3M
  • The equality chapter of the adopted 2026 state budget (chapter 351): research, grants, gender diversity, the equality centres: NOK 184.4M
  • Of that, the five equality centres (item 73), of which Reform is one: NOK 29.45M
  • The Equality and Anti-Discrimination Ombud, base funding 2026 (chapter 353): NOK 56.3M

The Reform figure is from tilskudd.no (recipient page, org no. 984727240, read 21 August 2026): 9 grants across five schemes, 1.9M of it from the family-and-equality scheme; not all 2026 awards are published yet, so the figure can rise, and Reform's share of the equality-centre base funding over chapter 351 item 73 comes on top. The Bufdir scheme is neutral by regulation (Lovdata FOR-2022-01-14-70) and counts as nobody's column; its frame was raised from 17.6M to 21.6M by an amendment letter of 10 March 2026, which the scheme's own pages had not caught by 1 September (corr-094). The DT-0853 row replaced the zero row on 1 September 2026: earmarked for boys and young men by target group, purpose crime prevention in IMDi's own words, in the state's own grant register since 2025, verified against three publishers (corr-091). Beside it stand Menn i helse (29.1M granted 2025, 30.1M proposed 2026), the named UiT grant Gutter og helsefag (2M in 2026), and krisesenterlova's statutory men's residential crisis-centre duty, 39 centres in 2025. The chapter-351 and Ombud figures are the budget as adopted by the Storting in autumn 2025 (the blue book, read 21 August 2026): research and studies 46.4M, equality grants 64.5M, gender and sexuality diversity 44.1M, the equality centres 29.45M. These are Norway's own domestic machinery lines and they serve everybody.

Sweden, same method: verified rows

  • UN Women, total contributions 2023 (the entity's own portal): largest single country that year: $51.2M
  • State grant for women's and girls' organising, regulation 2023:168: the appropriation: SEK 48M per year
  • Paid from it as organisationsbidrag, grant years 2024 and 2025, to 67 associations: SEK 25.97M and 27.37M
  • Paid from it as verksamhetsbidrag, same decision round, to 17 organisations: SEK 20.33M and 18.91M
  • Jämställdhetsprojekt, neutral project pot, 2026 appropriation: SEK 12M
  • Regulation-based state grant for men's and boys' organising: none found
  • The organisation MÄN, public operating and project grants 2025, per their own annual report: SEK 37.1M

Sources: open.unwomen.org (read 20 August 2026, receipt in the fact table) and the Swedish Gender Equality Agency's own reporting, Rapport 2026:14, which states “Anslaget har höjts till 48 miljoner kronor per år”, and gives the paid sums as 25 965 tkr and 27 374 tkr in organisationsbidrag and 20 325 tkr and 18 906 tkr in verksamhetsbidrag. The appropriation and the two grant streams are different measures and are shown on separate lines rather than added together. The Swedish women's scheme is regulation-based and single-sex in purpose; no counterpart for men has been found, and the row can be disproven with one source. The neutral project pot (12M in 2026, up from 10) is the agency's own reporting and counts as nobody's column. MÄN's row is their own annual report for 2025 (mfj.se, published 29 May 2026): public operating grants SEK 11,946,750 plus public project grants SEK 25,115,312. That figure includes their internationally directed programme and SEK 8.0M passed on to partner organisations, and none of it flows from any men's-specific regulation, so the 'none found' row above stands beside it.

Finland, same method: verified rows

  • UN Women, total contributions 2023 (the entity's own portal), core 21.8 of 32.0: $32.0M
  • Law 663/2007: state grants to three named women's organisations, 2025 appropriation: €918,000
  • Statutory state grant to named men's organisations: none found
  • Miessakit ry (men's organisation): STEA grants 2026, six grant targets: €1,365,435

Sources: open.unwomen.org and Finlex 663/2007 with the state budget's item 29.10.51 (€918,000 in 2025, up from 518,000 in 2024). Finland thus funds three women's organisations by dedicated law; no equivalent law for men's organisations has been found. The Miessakit figure is from STEA's own database avustukset.stea.fi (read 21 August 2026); some items may be proposals awaiting the ministry's final decision, and the figure is read with that caveat.

Denmark, same method: verified rows

  • UN Women, total contributions 2023 (the entity's own portal): $18.7M
  • KVINFO, the state-supported knowledge centre for gender and equality: 2026 finance act, knowledge centre plus mentor network: DKK 11.6M
  • State-supported knowledge centre for men: none found
  • Public funding of outpatient counselling at crisis centres for men, per Mandecentret's own 2025 annual report: none

Sources: open.unwomen.org, KVINFO's own finance-act account, and Mandecentret's 2025 annual report, held in this site's archive, which writes verbatim: while women's crisis centres have for years received finance-act and SSA funding for their outpatient counselling, there is no public funding for outpatient counselling services at crisis centres for men. And further: if you are a woman. Men do not have the same option. The none-found row for a state-supported knowledge centre for men can still be disproven with one source.

Iceland, same method: verified rows

  • UN Women, total contributions 2023 (the entity's own portal): $2.6M
  • Kvennaathvarfið, the women's shelter: contributions from the Icelandic state 2025, per their own annual report: ISK 115.0M
  • A corresponding state-funded crisis shelter for men: none found
  • Jafnréttissjóður Íslands, the equality fund: 2025 allocation, ten projects, per the open register: ISK 50.7M
  • Of those, projects naming boys or men: one, a study of the public debate about boys: ISK 7.0M
  • A men's organisation with a state operating grant, the pattern Reform and Miessakit follow: none found

Sources: open.unwomen.org (read 21 August 2026; Iceland's national committee gave a further $1.1M the same year), Kvennaathvarfið's own 2025 annual report (state rows 86.2M plus 28.8M for Akureyri, regional education and anti-trafficking work, held in this site's archive), and the Rannís open register for the equality fund. Fairness requires two notes. Stígamót, the counselling centre for survivors of sexual violence, received ISK 91.1M in state operating support in 2024 by its own annual report and serves all genders. And across the fund's 64 grants since 2019, five name men or boys: the masculinity project Karlmennskan (8M, 2020), a boys-into-nursing drive (4.7M, 2020), a course for men who want to act against violence against women (4M, 2019), a study of male perpetrators (6M, 2019) and the 2025 discourse study. The absence of a men's shelter has been publicly discussed in Iceland since 2017; both none-found rows can be disproven with one source.

The United Kingdom, same method: verified rows, and the series' first exception

  • UN Women, total contributions 2023 (the entity's own portal): $14.9M
  • England's Men's Health Strategy, published 19 November 2025 (CP 1432): suicide prevention aimed at middle-aged men: £3.6M
  • Men's health fund building on the strategy, opening summer 2026: £6.3M
  • Domestic-abuse victims package (December 2025), victim-neutral in scope, over three years: £480M + £550M

Sources: open.unwomen.org and gov.uk (the 19 November 2025 press release plus the strategy document CP 1432, and the December victims package). The United Kingdom is the first country in this series where the men's column carries dated, funded rows instead of none found: real, small, and from last autumn. The scale the reader judges alone: the rows stand side by side.

The Netherlands, same method: verified rows, and a second exception

  • UN Women, total contributions 2023 (the entity's own portal): $11.1M
  • OCW budget article 25, Emancipation: the whole national line 2025, gender and LHBTI+ equality combined: €21.8M
  • Emancipator, the men's emancipation organisation: government subsidies 2025, per their own ANBI filing: €262,208
  • A state-funded knowledge institute for men, the counterpart of the scheme's archive line for women's history (Atria): none found

Sources: open.unwomen.org (read 21 August 2026; the Dutch national committee gave a further $0.11M the same year), the tabled 2025 budget on rijksfinancien.nl (article 25: 21.777M in 2025, 21.737M planned for 2026), the subsidy regulation for gender and LHBTI+ equality 2022-2027 on wetten.overheid.nl, and Emancipator's own ANBI filing (262,208 in 2025, 280,616 in 2024, held in this site's archive; the figure covers all levels of government). The regulation defines its object as equal treatment, rights and opportunities for women, men and non-binary persons, funds eight alliances, and carries an archive line under which Atria keeps the women's-history collection; no counterpart institute for men has been found. Emancipator's own annual report names the ministry's emancipation directorate as funder of its men's-emancipation project under the national action programme against sexually transgressive behaviour, which makes the Netherlands the second country in the series with a funded men's row. The scale the reader judges alone: the rows stand side by side.

Germany, same method: verified rows, and a third exception

  • UN Women, total contributions 2023 (the entity's own portal): $39.8M
  • Bundesstiftung Gleichstellung, the statutory equality foundation (2021 law), federal allocation 2025: €5.8M
  • Deutscher Frauenrat, the women's umbrella: institutional grant from the family ministry, latest self-published table (2017): €816,300
  • Bundesforum Männer, the umbrella for boys, men and fathers: grants 2024, per their own published accounts: €872,960

Sources: open.unwomen.org (read 21 August 2026; the German national committee gave a further $0.8M the same year), the foundation law on gesetze-im-internet.de with the Bundestag's own bulletin on the 2025 allocation (5.8M, of which 3.3M personnel), Deutscher Frauenrat's self-published transparency table (its latest, dated 2017), and Bundesforum Männer's self-published 2024 accounts (grants 872,960 of total income 911,005, held in this site's archive). Their transparency page adds that project grants from the family ministry made up about 93 per cent of 2024 income, currently for the project Nachhaltige Männlichkeit fördern, Toxische Männlichkeit überwinden. The two umbrella figures come from different years and different funding forms, institutional against project-based, and stand side by side with that caveat. Germany is the third country in the series with a funded men's row, and the first where a men's umbrella exists at federal level at all. Both umbrellas are funded by the ministry whose name lists families, senior citizens, women and youth.

Australia, same method: verified rows, and a fourth exception

  • UN Women, total contributions 2023 (the entity's own portal): $22.4M
  • National Women's Health Strategy 2020-2030, funding announced at launch, April 2019: A$52.2M
  • National Men's Health Strategy 2020-2030, funding announced at launch, same ministry, same month: A$19.7M
  • Men's health package from 1 July 2025, four years: sheds, fathers, practitioner training, research: A$32M

Sources: open.unwomen.org (read 21 August 2026; the Australian national committee gave a further $1.0M the same year) and the health ministry's own April 2019 launch releases for the two decade strategies, both still on the ministers' site. The 2025 package is the Parliamentary Budget Office's published costing (11.7M + 11.7M + 6M + 2.6M across four years; 8.3M to the National Shed Development Program, 7.4M to Movember's Ahead of the Game, 3M to Healthy Male's Plus Paternal, 2M to the Black Dog Institute for research on men's mental health and suicide, 11.3M for practitioner training and a help-seeking campaign), committed by both major political groupings before the 2025 election, and the men's-sheds association's own 2025 report confirms its arrival. Australia is the fourth exception, and the first country in the series with a decade health strategy for each sex from the same ministry. The scale the reader judges alone: the rows stand side by side.

Canada, same method: verified rows, and an exception with a date on it

  • UN Women, total contributions 2023 (the entity's own portal): $20.7M
  • Women and Gender Equality Canada, the federal department: planned spending 2025-26, its own departmental plan: C$407.1M
  • Canadian Men's Health Foundation: the federal investment announced 2016-2017, budget commitment plus the public-health agency: C$4.5M
  • A standing federal department, strategy or budget line for men's health or men's equality: none found

Sources: open.unwomen.org (read 21 August 2026; the portal's 2023 export carries no Canadian national-committee row), the department's own 2025-26 departmental plan on canada.ca (planned spending 407,142,146 dollars, 444 staff), and the 2017 canada.ca news release on the 4M budget-2016 investment in the foundation's Don't Change Much programme plus 519,000 over three years from the public-health agency. The foundation's own pages record its later government money as provincial: 5M over five years from Ontario, 1M from British Columbia. The two middle rows are from different years and stand with their dates. The none-found row concerns standing federal machinery and can be disproven with one source.

Every figure here can be re-derived. The marker list comes from a URL that returns the same list to anyone who requests it. The sector totals come from OECD's own endpoint with the query recorded. The classification is published row by row, including the rows we are least sure about, and the two errors caught during the work are written down beside the finding they would have corrupted.

None of it proposes taking anything from women and girls, and the register has said so in the same words since the first page was written. A second column is not a slice of the first.

There is a UN Women. There is no UN Men. This is the ask, and it takes one tap.

— voices so far · one tap, anonymous, no signup

Questions this article answers

What is UN for Men Too asking for?

A body inside the United Nations whose subject is men and boys: an entity with a mandate, a budget, a research function and reporting duties, in the way UN Women has all four for women and girls. Not a slogan and not a single statistic. The measurement gaps documented on this site are evidence of what the absence of such a body costs, rather than the request itself.

How much aid is spent on men and boys?

Nobody can say, and that is the finding rather than an evasion. The OECD DAC counts eleven cross-cutting policy objectives, including disability and maternal health. None has men or boys as its object, so no screening question exists that would produce a figure.

What is an OECD policy marker?

A screening question donors answer for every project they report: does this target the objective as its principal purpose, as a significant secondary purpose, or not at all. The markers are biodiversity, climate mitigation, climate adaptation, desertification, environment, governance, RMNCH, nutrition, disability and disaster risk reduction, plus gender equality with a dataflow of its own.

How much aid is marked for gender equality?

In 2022, DAC and EU donors committed 1,874 million dollars of gender-marked aid to social infrastructure alone, of which 223 million had gender equality as the principal objective. Government and civil society took 805 million, education 214 million.

Does aid money for men exist at all?

Yes. Reading individual project records, 378 activities name men or boys specifically, and 139 of them treat men as the people being helped. By money the largest single category by far is voluntary medical male circumcision for HIV prevention, which is 79 per cent of it.

Where this goes, and what would settle it

The test of everything above is the classification. All 378 records are published with the donor, the year, the amount and the code we gave them, so anyone can classify them again. If enough are miscoded to move the 79 per cent materially, this article is wrong and the corrected figure goes in the log with the date. The sweep of 35,000 records runs on the same public file.

The ask that follows is not the box. Another marker would let anyone run this count as a query instead of by hand, and it would take nothing from the eleven that exist, but a marker is one bolt. What is missing is the machine: a body inside the UN with a mandate, a budget and people whose job it is to know this number without anyone reading 35,000 records to find it.

The three documents this rests on

All three are public and are linked here directly rather than described. Read them yourself. That is the point of putting them at the top of their own section instead of at the bottom of a reference list.

OECD DAC The policy marker codelist, from OECD's own SDMX endpoint pulled 18 August 2026 Open it on sdmx.oecd.org → OECD Development finance for gender equality, the dashboard behind the sector totals 2022 data Open it on oecd.org → The classification, all 378 rows The rows behind this article as one file: every activity our sweep found naming men or boys, with the donor, the year, the amount and the code we gave it, plus the 71 Norwegian verdicts with their rules and honesty notes. Recode them and tell us where we are wrong. 378 IATI activities, 71 CRS verdicts Built 23 August 2026 Open it on unformentoo.org →

By Mikal Monslaup with Claude (Anthropic)

for UN for Men Too, independent research by Mikal Steen Monslaup, supported by Manderådet and MannsForum. This article is the author's own work and is not a statement by either organisation.

First published Plain text version

EnglishNorsk

Source notes and accuracy flags

This section is part of the article, not an appendix to it. It records where each figure came from, what was checked, and every place where the honest version of a claim is weaker than the version that would have read better.

Source notes
  • The IATI harvest, the classification of all 378 activities, the classification rules written before the data was read, and the record of the two errors caught during the work are in the site's repository under research/. The raw 129 MB sweep is held locally and hashed rather than published, because it is third-party data and reproducible from the documented queries.
  • The donor-by-donor marker figures in the explorer come from the OECD's SDMX endpoint and were pulled on 19 August 2026. The raw pull, with the exact query URL behind every number, is in the repository at research/donor-markers-2022.json, and the individual donors sum to the OECD's own DAC and EU aggregate to the decimal, which is the check that they are not being counted twice.

Every figure in this article also appears in the register, with its exact value and primary source, and any correction to it will appear in the corrections log with the date it was made.

This page keeps four anonymous totals: pages loaded, read to the end, a source or receipt opened, and the support panel opened. No identifier is stored, repeats are limited by a salted network hash that expires in an hour, Do Not Track switches it off entirely, and the totals are public through the same API that serves them.