At Womanity we take delight in investing in modern and sustainable world options that forestall violence in opposition to girls and women (VAWG) and speed up gender equality.
With 1 in 3 women experiencing physical and/or sexual violence in their lifetime and just 0.2% of global aid and development funding directed to gender-based violence (GBV) prevention, the urgency to implement programmes that break new floor and drive progress, has by no means been larger.
Our method is to work carefully with native companions to beat obstacles and unlock girls’s potential in underserved components of the world so that girls and women can reside freed from violence, permitting complete communities to thrive.
Not reinventing the wheel
While innovation is vital to creating new methods to finish VAWG, this doesn’t all the time imply creating new initiatives or interventions. Over the previous few a long time, many organisations across the globe have applied violence prevention programmes which have proved extremely efficient and had lasting influence.
For us, discovering programmes which can be already working in a single nation with a selected neighborhood and supporting a thought-about adaptation to a different neighborhood in a unique a part of the world is an important instrument in creating new options to finish VAWG.
On this approach, the learnings and advantages of a profitable programme can resonate and be contextualised for various components of the globe.
Shifting energy dynamics
Historically organisations within the International North have held many of the energy in deciding which programmes might be applied in a selected nation. In worldwide improvement, it’s nonetheless quite common that the organisations who run programmes in native communities haven’t any say on how the work ought to be applied.
These native organisations possess the deep contextual data and lived expertise needed to find out what actually works. When their insights and experiences are neglected, even essentially the most well-intentioned and well-funded interventions are at important threat of failure — and will even trigger unintended hurt. Most significantly, this method fails to acknowledge that the best options to handle violence inside a neighborhood come from the native girls’s rights organisations already engaged on the bottom.
At Womanity, we take a holistic and feminist method to advancing the work on violence prevention. Since 2014, we now have been working carefully with native companions within the International South, creating and refining an modern partnership mannequin to reinforce the efficient adaptation and scaling of confirmed prevention programmes for brand new contexts.
Via our Womanity Award, we now have leveraged this mannequin to help collaborations between pairs of organisations within the International South, permitting them to determine how greatest to adapt an present programme to serve a brand new neighborhood successfully. On this approach, we guarantee collective decision-making and open dialogue between all events from the outset, essential for establishing belief and creating sustainable, significant change.
Supporting International South/South collaborations
Utilizing this method, during the last ten years we now have supported 9 organisations working in Brazil, Cape Verde, India, Lebanon, Mexico, and South Africa. As an illustration, Equimundo: Center for Masculinities and Social Justice (Brazil) collaborated with ABAAD (Lebanon) to adapt a programme that labored with males and boys to forestall gender-based violence in Lebanon between 2014 and 2017. Even after our help got here to an finish, the companions continued to work collectively and located significant methods to collaborate with the objective of growing and deepening their attain in Lebanon and the Center East.
At the moment, in Cape Verde, Themis Gender Justice and Human Rights (Brazil) are partnering with native organisation Associação Cabo-Verdiana de Luta Contra Violência Baseada no Género to adapt a home violence prevention programme offering girls neighborhood leaders with authorized coaching to allow them to grow to be brokers for change – they’re referred to as Girls Multipliers of Citizenship. These neighborhood leaders will then help girls in conditions of violence to get entry to justice. They can even work in colleges, native civil society organisations and key institutional stakeholders to boost consciousness about girls’s rights and entry to justice.
Our objective is to not solely speed up the variation of latest fashions for stopping VAWG however to additionally catalyse and foster South/South collaborations between girls’s rights organisations to allow them to study from one another in a power-balanced approach while elevating consciousness, mobilising communities, altering social norms and creating secure public, non-public and on-line areas for ladies and women.
To this finish, we partnered with the Center on Gender Equity and Health (GEH) at the University of California for 3 years on a examine to determine which features of our mannequin are extra essential to the success of the work, not solely to enhance our mannequin but in addition to share with others within the discipline. We now have compiled our findings in a brand new report Accelerating Innovation and Impact in International Development. Lately, we launched these findings on the SVRI Forum 2024, in South Africa with the intention of advancing world data on this space.
We hope that our learnings will present significant insights for practitioners, funders, researchers, and anybody working in world improvement. By sharing and exchanging data, constructing on confirmed efficient methods and dealing collectively, we will realise a violence-free world for ladies in all their variety.
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