The UN System-wide Action Plan (UN-SWAP) on gender equality and women’s empowerment constitutes the first unified accountability framework to systematically revitalize, capture, monitor and measure performance on mainstreaming gender perspectives into the work of the UN system.
Created as a response to ECOSOC agreed conclusions 1997/2, which called upon the UN system to mainstream a gender perspective throughout its work, and the CEB endorsed UN System-wide Policy on Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women in 2006. 
Following the creation of UN Women in 2010, the UN-SWAP framework was developed through inter-agency consultations to operationalize the policy. The UN-SWAP was endorsed by the United Nations Chief Executives Board for Coordination (CEB) in April 2012.
In response to the request of the United Nations General Assembly in resolution 67/226, the Joint Inspection Unit review (JIU/REP/2019/2) of the UN-SWAP 1.0 (2012-2017) found that the UN-SWAP has proven to be a catalyst for progress towards gender mainstreaming, an effective framework for tracking system-wide advancement and a system-wide achievement. UN-SWAP 2.0 (2018-2022) raised the bar for accountability by strengthening existing indicators and anchoring the framework within the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. UN-SWAP 2.0 and the equivalent framework at the UN country team level, UN Country Team System-wide Action Plan (UNCT-SWAP) Gender Equality Scorecard, have been contextualized to the UN reform and the planned move to system-wide reporting on collective results linked to gender-related targets of the SDGs, including SDG 5. The gender dimensions of the UN Response to the health and development crisis emanating from the COVID-19 have been also integrated in the accountability frameworks for the period 2020-2022.