At Womanity we take pride in investing in innovative and sustainable global solutions that prevent violence against women and girls (VAWG) and accelerate 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 ground and drive progress, has never been greater.
Our approach is to work closely with local partners to overcome barriers and unlock women’s potential in underserved parts of the world so that women and girls can live free of violence, allowing entire communities to thrive.
Not reinventing the wheel
Whilst innovation is key to developing new strategies to end VAWG, this doesn’t always mean creating new initiatives or interventions. Over the past few decades, many organisations around the globe have implemented violence prevention programmes that have proved highly effective and had lasting impact.
For us, finding programmes that are already working in one country with a particular community and supporting a considered adaptation to another community in a different part of the world is a crucial tool in developing new solutions to end VAWG.
In this way, the learnings and benefits of a successful programme can resonate and be contextualised for different parts of the globe.
Shifting power dynamics
Traditionally organisations in the Global North have held most of the power in deciding which programmes will be implemented in a particular country. In international development, it is still very common that the organisations who run programmes in local communities have no say on how the work should be implemented.
These local organisations possess the deep contextual knowledge and lived experience necessary to determine what really works. When their insights and experiences are overlooked, even the most well-intentioned and well-funded interventions are at significant risk of failure — and may even cause unintended harm. Most importantly, this approach fails to acknowledge that the most effective solutions to address violence within a community come from the local women’s rights organisations already working on the ground.
At Womanity, we take a holistic and feminist approach to advancing the work on violence prevention. Since 2014, we have been working closely with local partners in the Global South, developing and refining an innovative partnership model to enhance the effective adaptation and scaling of proven prevention programmes for new contexts.
Through our Womanity Award, we have leveraged this model to support collaborations between pairs of organisations in the Global South, allowing them to decide how best to adapt an existing programme to serve a new community effectively. In this way, we ensure collective decision-making and open dialogue between all parties from the outset, crucial for establishing trust and creating sustainable, meaningful change.
Supporting Global South/South collaborations
Using this approach, over the last ten years we have supported nine organisations working in Brazil, Cape Verde, India, Lebanon, Mexico, and South Africa. For instance, Equimundo: Center for Masculinities and Social Justice (Brazil) collaborated with ABAAD (Lebanon) to adapt a programme that worked with men and boys to prevent gender-based violence in Lebanon between 2014 and 2017. Even after our support came to an end, the partners continued to work together and found meaningful ways to collaborate with the goal of increasing and deepening their reach in Lebanon and the Middle East.
Currently, in Cape Verde, Themis Gender Justice and Human Rights (Brazil) are partnering with local organisation Associação Cabo-Verdiana de Luta Contra Violência Baseada no Género to adapt a domestic violence prevention programme providing women community leaders with legal training so they can become agents for change – they are called Women Multipliers of Citizenship. These community leaders will then support women in situations of violence to get access to justice. They will also work in schools, local civil society organisations and key institutional stakeholders to raise awareness about women’s rights and access to justice.
Our goal is to not only accelerate the adaptation of new models for preventing VAWG but to also catalyse and foster South/South collaborations between women’s rights organisations so they can learn from each other in a power-balanced way whilst raising awareness, mobilising communities, changing social norms and creating safe public, private and online spaces for women and girls.
To this end, we partnered with the Center on Gender Equity and Health (GEH) at the University of California for three years on a study to identify which aspects of our model are more critical to the success of the work, not only to improve our model but also to share with others in the field. We have compiled our findings in a new report Accelerating Innovation and Impact in International Development. Recently, we launched these findings at the SVRI Forum 2024, in South Africa with the aim of advancing global knowledge in this area.
We hope that our learnings will provide meaningful insights for practitioners, funders, researchers, and anyone working in global development. By sharing and exchanging knowledge, building on proven effective strategies and working together, we will be able to realise a violence-free world for women in all their diversity.
Learn more at womanity.org
