In any given year, about 1 in 8 women and girls will be victims of violence. While significant global progress has been made towards women’s rights and empowerment, rates of violence experienced by women have not improved over the last few decades. General improvements in global health and development alone are not enough to reduce violence, and we must focus on and prioritize finding solutions that make the world safer for women.
There is strong evidence that violence prevention is effective and has great long lasting impacts.
High-quality studies show that community-led programs conducted over 1-3 years have been able to significantly reduce violence rates by shifting individual, interpersonal and community level attitudes and norms about gender. Robust evidence through randomized controlled trials have shown that such programs reduce the likelihood of women being victims of violence by a third, with effects that can persist for many years.
CEDOVIP is a locally-led Uganda-based nonprofit that establishes and helps run community led programs focused on reducing violence throughout Kampala and northern Uganda, with ambitious plans to scale their work throughout the rest of the country. Their program, called SASA!, and its implementation by CEDOVIP have been validated through several randomized controlled trials and internal evaluations. In conjunction with implementing SASA!, they are involved in policy advocacy to strengthen policy and prevention efforts for violence prevention, including both implantation of current laws and new policies. So far, CEDOVIP has supported nearly 200,000 women and trained nearly 200 groups in the SASA! Program.
Breakthrough Trust: Breakthrough Trust, in India, works on culture-based change, focusing their programs on girls and boys aged 11 to 24, based on the establishment of attitudes and values in adolescence. They partner with government and help redesign school curricula to include material on gendered violence, as well as running mass media campaigns to reach a large audience. Breakthrough Trust is working to reach 4 million adolescents in schools and communities to mold gender norms and beliefs before they solidify in behavior. So far, Breakthrough has reached nearly 1 million adolescents in 13 districts and 4 states, including Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Jharkhand and Delhi/NCR.
