Gender equality and gender norms: framing the opportunities for health.

In the past decades, donors and development actors have been increasingly mindful of the evidence to support long-term, dynamic social norms change. This paper draws lessons and implications on scaling social norms change initiatives for gender equality to prevent violence against women and girls (VAWG) and improve sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR), from the Community for Understanding Scale Up (CUSP). CUSP is a group of nine organisations working across four regions with robust experience in developing evidence-based social norms change methodologies and supporting their scale-up across various regions and contexts. More specifically, the paper elicits learning from methodologies and experiences from five CUSP members - GREAT, IMAGE, SASA!, Stepping Stones, and Tostan. The discussion raises political questions around the current donor landscape including those positioned to assume leadership to take such methodologies to scale, and the current evaluation paradigm to measure social norms change at scale. CUSP makes the following recommendations for donors and implementers to scale social norms initiatives effectively and ethically: invest in longer-term programming, ensure fidelity to values of the original programmes, fund women's rights organisations, prioritise accountability to their communities and demands, critically examine the government and marketplace's role in scale, and rethink evaluation approaches to produce evidence that guides scale-up processes and fully represents the voices of activists and communities from the Global South.

https://tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/26410397.2019.1599654

On the CUSP: the politics and prospects of scaling social norms change programming.

Women's fund are public foundations that aims to support and fund women-led solutions to the root causes of social injustice. Supporting feminist groups and movements is the most effective and lasting route to ending the inequality and injustice experienced by many millions of women, girls and trans people around the world.

Investing well in the right places: why fund women's funds

This article is a response to the global Beijing +25 call to take stock of the status of women and the assessment of current challenges to gender equality and women’s empowerment. It presents a cas...

Evaluating Beijing +25: The Case of Joint Programming in Prevention and Response to Violence against Women in Uganda

The women's funding movement has contributed to and been a product of women's rights movements around the world. This article looks at the history of Mama Cash, the first international women's fund, to chart how the effort to mobilise resources for women's rights activism has been going – before and since the Fourth World Conference on Women held in Beijing in 1995.

/pdf/big-plans-small-steps-learnings-from-three-decades-of-53at0iivcw.pdf

Zohra Moosa

Papers

Big Plans, Small Steps: Learnings from Three Decades of Mobilising Resources for Women's Rights

Special Issue : Beijing 20 : Where Now for Gender Equality ?