In spite of the growing body of literature documenting the prevalence of violence against women and girls, there remains a paucity of evaluations of the impact of interventions in this area. The majority of evaluations of programmes to prevent and respond to such violence take the form of qualitative, input or process-level assessments, as opposed to approaches that measure the outcomes for the participant group. Most of the impact evaluations included in this report are cited repeatedly across the literature, indicating their relative scarcity.
Nevertheless, the handful of available impact evaluations demonstrate that a range of methodologies can be effectively deployed to measure the impact of interventions to prevent and respond to violence against women and girls: from pure qualitative approaches; to mixed method and quasi-experimental designs; to experimental, randomised control trials. Because of the limited number of evaluations available, however, it is difficult to get a sense of the relative utility and benefits of different methodologies, or to identify any clear pattern of how they have been applied to assess different types of interventions. Few of the evaluation reports included here comment on the reasons behind the choice of methodology, or provide any assessment of its relative merits.
The report indicates the types of programmes that have demonstrated positive results in addressing violence against women and girls. In particular : i) there is evidence that community-based participatory learning approaches involving men and women can create more gender-equitable relationships; ii) there is evidence that microfinance programs can lead to reduction in gender-based violence when integrated with participatory training on HIV, gender, and violence; iii) training teachers about gender-based violence can change norms about acceptance of gender-based violence; and iv) multi-media health promotion can increase awareness of violence against women.
