Policy Briefing - August 2025 This report sheds light on the urgent and often overlooked realities faced by displaced women and girls across Muslim-majority regions, including the Middle East, the Horn of Africa, and the Sahel. As global displacement reaches record levels—over 120 million in 2025—women and girls are disproportionately affected by a complex and compounding ...» more
Gender
Donor Support for the Human Rights of LGBT+
This rapid review synthesises evidence on the bilateral and multilateral donors promoting and protecting the human rights of LGBT+ people on a global scale. It focusses on those donors that have policies, implementation plans and programmes on LGBT+ rights. This review also examines the evidence on the impact of their work. The bilateral donors providing the most ...» more
Interventions to Address Discrimination against LGBTQi Persons
Most of the programmes and interventions that are mentioned in the literature address LGBTQi rights by ensuring that men who have sex with men (MSM) and transgender people have access to healthcare that is funded by international aid. The other main conduit of support is to use aid funds to provide financial and technical support to organisations and activists who advocate for ...» more
Documentation of survivors of gender-based violence (GBV)
Documentation of gender-based violence (GBV) cases is important in allowing survivors to access support services and secure justice, and – on a wider scale – for analysis and improvement in GBV responses. GBV documentation carries significant risks for survivors and others, and hence must be taken with care. Key principles include: do no harm, take a survivor centred approach, ...» more
LGBT rights and inclusion in Small Island Developing States (SIDS)
This review looks at the extent to which LGBT rights are provided for under law in a range of SIDS, and the record on implementation/enforcement, as well as approaches to promote LGBT rights and inclusion. SIDS covered are those in the Caribbean, Pacific, and Atlantic-Indian Ocean-South China Sea (AIS) regions. The review draws on a mixture of grey literature (largely from ...» more
Gender, countering violent extremism and women, peace and security in Kenya
Kenya ranks 109 out of 153 countries in the Global Gender Gap Report 2020, with a score of 0.671. There are significant inequalities between males and females in education attainment, health outcomes, representation in parliament, and labour force participation. This Factsheet outlines some of the top-line information on gender, countering violent extremism and women, peace and ...» more
Gender and countering violent extremism (CVE) in the Kenya Mozambique region
This evidence synthesis drew on a mixture of academic and grey literature. While the literature on Kenyan women and Al-Shabaab was quite extensive (albeit with gaps, e.g. on returnees), nothing was found on women and Ansar al-Sunnah/violent extremist groups operating in northeastern Mozambique and the Mozambique-Tanzania cross-border region. This report should be read in ...» more
Key Drivers of Modern Slavery
This rapid literature review provides evidence of key drivers of modern slavery. It draws on a mixture of academic and grey literature from multinational and bilateral institutions as well as non-government organisations (NGOs) and think tanks. Given the rapidly developing global context, it also draws on emerging opinions from blog posts and journalistic reports to provide ...» more
Social and behaviour change communication interventions in Mozambique
Social and behaviour change communication (SBCC) is the use of communication to change behaviours by positively influencing knowledge, attitudes and social norms at the individual and community level. Approaches to SBCC include, but are not limited to: media campaigns, peer educators and mentors, small group sessions, community dialogues and events, and digital tools. This ...» more
Fossils fuels and job creation in Africa
Fossil fuel development, including oil, gas and coal, can provide or support employment in a number of different ways. Estimates for Africa’s extractive sector as a whole put it as employing less than 1% of Africa’s workforce (Fine et al., 2012). However, it is hard to determine the number of jobs supported directly or indirectly by the fossil fuels industry in different ...» more
Conditionality and other approaches to secure women’s rights provisions in peace processes
This rapid literature review found no examples of the use of aid conditionality specifically to ensure inclusion of women’s rights provisions in peace process outcomes but did identify other effective approaches, notably mobilisation of women, external pressure by mediators/international development partners, and funding and capacity building support for women’s groups. There ...» more
The future of work for women in the Indo-Pacific region
The ‘future of work’ is a policy concept that explores how various technological, socio-economic, geopolitical, demographic, cultural, and environmental megatrends are developing and interacting to create new types of jobs, industries, labour conditions, and business models. It is not well-defined or critiqued as a definition, and there is no standard approach to what concepts ...» more
Social protection
Social protection is commonly understood as ‘all public and private initiatives that provide income or consumption transfers to the poor, protect the vulnerable against livelihood risks and enhance the social status and rights of the marginalised; with the overall objective of reducing the economic and social vulnerability of poor, vulnerable and marginalised groups’ (Devereux ...» more
Interventions to Reduce Forced Marriage
This review drew largely on academic papers as well as reports by international development organisations. Evidence and hence lessons on how to combat forced marriage are limited and sometimes contradictory. Overall, the literature points to a number of approaches that can be effective, notably: empowerment of girls; community approaches to change social norms and attitudes on ...» more
Preventing/Countering Violent Extremism Programming on Men, Women, Boys and Girls
Gender and age can have a big influence on people’s roles in relation to violent extremism: if they are vulnerable to recruitment, if they join violent extremist groups, the driving factors, what their participation in violent extremism entails, and – critically – what approaches should be taken to preventing or countering violent extremism (P/CVE). Hence, it is important not ...» more
Effectiveness of Donor Support to Women in Formal Political Leadership-Narrative Review
This narrative review synthesises a selection of key evidence based on a rapid, non-systematic literature review (this makes it subject to limitations).The evidence base offers no comparative rankings on which types of interventions, and which specific interventions, have been more effective. Overall, it shows that the interventions most frequently used by aid actors, including ...» more
Effectiveness of Aid Interventions to Strengthen Collective Action that Facilitate Women’s Political Empowerment – Executive Summary
Collective action can play an important role in facilitating women's political engagement, and in advancing women's empowerment in formal and informal politics, in low-, middle-, and high-income countries, as shown by significant rigorous evidence. This executive summary summarises a rapid review which synthesises key findings on how aid interventions can strengthen ...» more
Effectiveness of Donor Support to Women in Formal Political Leadership – Executive Summary
Pressures to increase the number of women in formal politics have started to bear fruit over the past 20 years. This has led to a greater presence of women in elected, appointed, and recruited positions in public bodies, and (to a lesser extent) to their rise to senior positions in these settings. This executive summary summarises a rapid review which synthesises key ...» more
Effectiveness of Aid Interventions to Strengthen Collective Action that Facilitate Women’s Political Empowerment – Annotated Bibliography
There is significant rigorous evidence that collective action can play an important role in facilitating women's political engagement, and in advancing women's empowerment in formal and informal politics, in low-, middle- and high-income countries. Certainly, collective action does not automatically lead to engagement and empowerment. Further, it does not always lead to all ...» more
Effectiveness of Aid Interventions to Strengthen Collective Action that Facilitate Women’s Political Empowerment – Narrative Review
Collective action can play an important role in facilitating women’s political engagement, and in advancing women’s empowerment in formal and informal politics, in low-, middle- and high-income countries, as shown by significant rigorous evidence. Yet, there is only limited and patchy rigorous evidence about how aid interventions can strengthen collective action to facilitate ...» more
