Guidance for evaluations of interventions to prevent violence against women in conflict-affected settings: Lessons from a trial in Cote d'Ivoire

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Violence against women and girls (VAWG) includes intimate partner violence (IPV), child sexual abuse, forced marriage, sexual harassment, and rape. Although 'rape in war' has become a priority in the nascent area of programming to prevent VAWG, emerging evidence from conflict settings suggests that IPV occurs more frequently than 'wartime rapes'. The past decade has seen an unprecedented recognition of the scale of VAWG in conflict, with the UN Security Council alone issuing nine resolutions focused on sexual violence in conflict and fragile state settings since 2000. While innovative interventions are being implemented, to date there has been no published evaluation research on the impact of VAWG prevention activities in conflict-affected settings, and only two published trials in sub-Saharan Africa have demonstrated how different prevention programming may influence levels of intimate partner violence. Without evidence on the impact and process of prevention activities, many agencies are struggling to determine how to target their resources most effectively. Programmers and donors recognise the need for rigorous evaluations of VAWG prevention strategies to determine how to measure the impact of programming and learn from ongoing and new large scale investments.This project aims to advance the field of VAWG intervention evaluation by developing a first generation of Evaluation Guidance for VAWG prevention interventions in conflict-affected settings. Our project will build on our evaluation work in Cote d'Ivoire, a West African conflict-affected setting, as well as our other IPV prevention evaluations, and the field experience of the International Rescue Committee (IRC) (our project partner) and the needs of donors, such as the UK Department for International Development (DfID) to: 1) raise the profile of different forms of violence beyond 'rape in war' in conflict-affected settings; and 2) develop evaluation guidance to measure the impact of VAWG interventions. Questions we will consider include: What are effective ways to measure the influence of VAWG prevention activities? How can we evaluate VAWG prevention interventions with different levels of resources and technical capacity? What are realistic outcome and pathway indicators for different settings and time periods? How might the interaction between programme and research staff affect the evaluation? In developing the Evaluation Guidance, we will prioritise the needs of practitioners and donors by incorporating options for adaptation and flexibility so that this guidance can be modified for different settings and available financial and technical resources.To develop the proposed guidance, LSHTM and IRC will convene a Strategic Planning meeting with practitioners, donors and researchers to assess the state of VAWG prevention research, determine strategic measurement priorities and develop a framework to guide a desk-based analysis of prevention evaluation models. We will analyse data from our Cote d'Ivoire study to explore causal pathways for IPV and review methodological features for adaptation in future evaluation research. This information will be summarised for a Final Round Table Discussion with programme organisations, donors and researchers to refine the conclusions and the guidance. We will develop and implement a strategic dissemination plan that takes advantage of our group's leadership and participation in global and local fora on the subjects of violence against women and conflict-affected settings. Most importantly, this project will encourage programmes to address a wider range of VAWG in conflict settings and improve our understanding of what prevents and reduced violence.