“Women at the Centre”: Azerbaijan's National 860 Helpline for Gender-Based Violence Survivors

On 1 December 2020, Azerbaijan's State Committee for Family, Women and Children Affairs (SCFWCA) and UNFPA launched a free, confidential three-digit national helpline (860 from Baku, 012 860 elsewhere) for survivors of gender-based and domestic violence, offering psychological counselling and referrals to legal aid, healthcare and shelter. The service, staffed by two clinical psychologists, a coordinator, an accountant and a lawyer, runs under the “Women at the Centre” initiative funded by Takeda Pharmaceuticals, nested within the EU-funded EU4GenderEquality regional programme covering six Eastern Partnership countries.

By mid-2024, UNFPA reported the helpline had logged over 1,100 calls since launch, of which 44 led to in-person consultations — roughly a 4% conversion rate, with no published data on longer-term outcomes for those cases. UNFPA cites contextual figures indicating that about one in three women in Azerbaijan experiences partner violence in her lifetime, that the country of roughly 10 million people has only two dedicated domestic-violence shelters, and that gender-based violence costs an estimated 1.3 billion AZN annually — figures independently echoed in Eurasianet's reporting on the shelter gap.

The evidence here is real but modest and implementer-reported rather than independently audited: 1,100 calls over roughly 3.5 years is small relative to a country where a third of women report partner violence, and no third-party evaluation of the helpline's effectiveness was found. Most significantly, UNFPA closed its Azerbaijan country office in May 2025 as part of a government-ordered closure of several international-organisation offices, so whether the helpline continues to operate — or has been fully transferred to the State Committee — is unverified as of this review.

Read the full analysis: https://family.gov.az/en/post/2210/azerbaycanda-gender-esasli-zorakiliqla-bagli-qaynar-xett-fealiyyete-baslayib