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]]>This year marks the 20-year anniversary of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, the most progressive roadmap to gender equality, and the ratification of the Global Goals, for the first time including specific targets on ending violence against women and girls.
Having spent more than 20 years in research into preventing VAWG, gender inequality and health, I am overjoyed by the renewed global commitment. When DFID announced its intention in 2013 to provide an unprecedented £25 million towards researching effective strategies for preventing VAWG, I led a process to successfully bid for the major award of nearly £18 million. Together with my partners at London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) and Social Development Direct (SDD), we worked on a proposal that we felt could dramatically shift our current knowledge of VAWG prevention, and answer the important question of how we can prevent violence sustainably across the globe.
The DFID grant was an amazing opportunity to find interventions that were innovative and wide-ranging and that could improve our knowledge of what works to prevent VAWG. From our original call for proposals in early 2014, we received over 700 applications. None of us expected that level of enthusiasm!
We selected 17 projects that inspired us (and met our very stringent criteria). These interventions are funded through the new What Works programme, and all will be evaluated, with 12 receiving the most rigorous randomised control trial evaluation. These interventions are spread across 14 different countries, including Afghanistan, South Africa, DRC and many more.
Living in South Africa I have become painfully aware of how VAWG deeply impacts on every family, most heinously in the murder of women by their partners. So it feels right, that on the eve on the 16 Days of Activism, we are announcing a series of new evaluations in South Africa that, with support from DFID, aim to find out how to reduce VAWG in the country’s increasing urban informal settlements.
We know that VAWG is a leading cause of illness and death for a third of women globally, and in South Africa its prevalence is alarmingly high. Large studies among South African men found that 32% report enacting violence towards partners, and 28% of men have committed rape. Evidence from South Africa, Kenya and Bangladesh reveals that violence against women is most common in informal settlements.
Research suggests that men who stick with masculinities like toughness and hyper-sexuality are more likely to perpetrate VAWG. However, the evidence base for precisely how interventions can shift masculinities is limited. There is an urgent need to engage men in challenging rigid ideas about manhood and encouraging them to become agents of change.
Within South Africa there are two exciting interventions being evaluated – first the One Man Can intervention from Sonke Gender Justice, and the other is the Stepping Stones/Creating Futures intervention implemented by Project Empower. The One Man Can intervention is focused on social norms change, working primarily with men in an informal settlement (Diepsloot) in Johannesburg. If successful, the Sonke CHANGE Trial will be the first to show reductions in men’s violence in an urban informal setting. The Stepping Stones/Creating Futures intervention is focused on informal settlements in eThekwini (Durban), working with young women and men, who are out of school, to transform their gender relationships and strengthen their livelihoods.
These evaluations are underpinned by an absolute belief that violence can be prevented if we work to address the underlying causes of violence from multiple angles. Through these projects we will support a global movement for change so that all women and girls are free, equal and treated with dignity and respect.
Find out more at: www.whatworks.co.za
]]>Four months on, the Review is entering its final phase. A lot of progress has already been made. We've tried to ensure the Review has provided a great opportunity for CSOs of all shapes and sizes, from countries across the globe, to engage with DFID to help shape how we work together in the future. The engagement we’ve had in the Review has reinforced some of what we knew, suggested new ideas, and has been significant in helping to shape the Review’s outcomes.
Phase one of the Review focused on digital engagement, and achieved an average of two thousand blog views each post, 400 survey responses and 200 people from up to 26 countries participating in weekly twitter chats. We also carried out a portfolio analysis of DFID’s current funding to CSOs. Phase two, during which we held eight major face-to-face stakeholder events across England, Scotland and Wales, allowed us to gather views from the sector on key questions we were looking to answer – What can be done in the future to fully unlock and realise the potential of new types of partnerships? What needs to change in the way CSOs and DFID work together to deliver the new Global Goals? How can we create and manage a more strategic relationship and strengthened policy dialogue between DFID and CSOs? What should be the key characteristics of any new DFID funding instruments? These events were attended by representatives from across civil society, DFID Ministers and members of DFID’s senior management team, where they offered their views and had the chance to listen to the sector.
We're now entering the final phase of the Review. The Review Team are considering policy options and choices and the Secretary of State will make an announcement on the Review outcome in December, which is likely to focus on three strands: what our strategy is; how we can engage better together; and how we fund organisations. There will be opportunities for further engagement by the sector as the details of the proposed changes and future arrangements are designed and implemented.
This is an exciting time for civil society – an opportunity to maximise the potential of partnerships and ensure DFID’s engagement with CSOs allows us to deliver more for the world’s poorest. A huge thank you to all the people and organisations that took the time to give their feedback, opinions, evidence and ideas for what we can all do together to have the best possible impact in developing countries.
If you’d like to know more about the Review check out our webpage, follow @DFID_Inclusive on Twitter and use #DFIDCSPR to get involved.
]]>The 9 digital principles are a set of guidelines that have been agreed as a result of consultation with donors and NGOs including USAID, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, several UN agencies and the World Bank. They are based on and closely match the UK government design principles.
The digital development sector is full of unintended replication, failed pilots and low levels of collaboration. This negatively impacts not only other poorly-planned initiatives, but it also complicates things for the better ones. This can be confusing for beneficiaries and governments who are expected to make sense of the hundreds of tools that end up on offer.
The Principles for Digital Development are:
We’re seeing some great examples of innovative delivery using digital techniques. In education for example, we’re funding a smartphone-based monitoring tool in Bangladesh to investigate changes in the lives of beneficiaries. It involves taking a snapshot survey at household level every month, administered by NGO field staff. We can now be far more targeted in what we fund and support.
I have blogged previously about the importance of designing with the user. So here I want to focus on principle 7 – reuse and improve. This means looking to see examples of digital delivery that have been effective and replicating them, if appropriate. Using open source software to build web or data platforms and then sharing the code, for example, means these resources can be freely reused and improved by other organisations. Then DFID (and the UK taxpayer) get good value for money by only paying once for the design and build which others can then adapt for a different context.
So what are we doing to embed the digital principles? First of all, inside DFID we are learning lessons about which digital interventions work well, or not as well as expected, so we can adapt our programmes accordingly and get results faster. We’ll blog about this soon. Second, in any new procurement, we’ll require our partners and suppliers to set out how they will adhere to the relevant principles.
Each of the principles is explained in detail on the Principles for Digital Development website, illustrated by some useful case studies.
Keep in touch. Sign up for email updates from this blog, or follow Frances on Twitter.
]]>Why? Aside from some bad practices, the main reason is that the DRC has a bad reputation as a result of conflict and the consequent supply uncertainties. During the last few decades, Congolese coffee exports collapsed from a peak of 80,000 tonnes to only 8,000 tonnes now. That’s the official figure: exports are probably twice as high because much coffee is smuggled across the border and then sold as Ugandan or Rwandan coffee to avoid the “Congo discount”.
Earlier this month, I visited small and large coffee producers in Rutshuru territory in the province of North Kivu. Home to mountain gorillas in the world-famous Virunga National Park, the province is also DRC’s main coffee-growing region. The UKaid-funded ÉLAN RDC programme has the ambitious aim of stimulating Congo’s coffee production in a way that benefits small and poorer producers. This means improving the quality of coffee, introducing more efficient technologies, linking smaller with larger producers and, possibly, supporting the reintroduction of trade financing for the coffee sector.
A key issue for the coffee sector in North Kivu – as for other agriculture – is secure access to land. The province is home to seven million people and is densely populated. Conflict during the last decades has led to significant displacement, with 744,000 internally displaced people currently in the province. People fleeing from conflict or returning when the situation improves has increased pressure on land, playing into long-standing grievances over rights of land access and fuelling wider drivers of violent conflict.
Effective land administration – so that people know who owns which land and can obtain a title to prove it – is complex in any country. It became all the more difficult in Rutshuru territory when M23 rebels destroyed land records after they took control of the area in 2012. Through a programme implemented by UN Habitat, UKaid is building on localised land mediation efforts to support efforts to improve in a sustainable way the system by which land is governed. The project is now considering how it can support cadastral offices, including the one in Rutshuru, to facilitate a more transparent system of land management that the population can have trust in.
It will be many years before coffee reaches earlier production levels and land administrators are able to resolve remaining land challenges. The programmes mentioned above will work towards those aims. But I hope that it won’t be too long until the province is known again for good things, such as coffee ‘Made in Rutshuru, Eastern Congo’.
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Three weeks in and admittedly I may still be in the elation stage but as I get settled into Ligada, the programme I have been seconded into, I genuinely feel the programme, which is focused on female economic empowerment in Mozambique, finding opportunities to help adolescent girls and women through education, find work, and to address both the social and economic barriers that prevent them from reaching their full potential, is incredibly new, exciting and different!
Here are my top three reasons why. You can be the judge as to whether this is the flawed perspective of a newly-hatched expat…
Lots of questions - rather than beginning with a rigid idea of what works and then doing that to see if it does, Ligada has taken several steps back and is looking afresh at female economic empowerment. We’re questioning everything – perceptions of women’s roles, where they work, how they work, attitudes to work, access to services. Ligada has commissioned 8 studies and 4 papers that will detail the specific circumstances of the girls and women we hope to reach. This means that when we sit down to develop our Theory of Change, a process that will chart the work we plan to do, why, how and the anticipated impact of this work, we will have a huge amount of information to inform our approach, drawing together local and international experts in their fields to ensure we are not second guessing.
We have set aside a significant amount of time to design the programme. This is partly what has enabled point 1 above. We have the space to ask questions and revaluate, which means the team is buzzing with creativity. We have the space to ask ‘what if…’, to think big and follow up on new ideas.
There will come a point where we need to rationalise and prioritise but at this stage we’ve got time to let the ideas run and see where they take us. It means for example, we get to think about how to ensure we can integrate beneficiary feedback loops ( i.e regularly collecting and interpreting information from those we are seeking to help to see what is working where) into our monitoring and evaluation to enable genuine adaptive programming. The design of something like this takes time and requires creativity –we have the space for both.
As I see our thinking develop over this time I do wonder what happens if a programme goes too quickly into delivery – surely it stunts opportunities for innovation. This may be OK if a programme knows exactly what it needs to deliver and how it will be successfully delivered but I can’t think of any programme where there would not be a possibility of better delivery with some ‘what if’ time built in to the design/inception phase.
Of course there is a need to be strategic about this – a programme has a very short grace period before people want to see results. In anticipation of this, Ligada commissioned two studies at the outset to help start some interesting conversations about what DFID and other donors can do to increase their impact on female economic empowerment. These quick wins have brought Ligada valuable space and time.
OK – so this may seem superficial but I don’t think it is. Our office is right in the heart of Maputo – a lab where other businesses and social enterprises all buy desk space, wifi, etc so they have a flexible space to work in. It has the feel of a San Francisco start up – although probably a little hotter and with more power outages.
There is a mixture of people here all trying to think about the problems Mozambique presents. This attitude and energy can carry people a long way to finding innovative solutions to the kinds of problems Ligada is grappling with. It helps to be working somewhere where there is this feeling of possibility.
So these are my top three – and I don’t think it’s because I’m still in a fog of elation. A few weeks back the Overseas Development Institute, a Ligada partner, published a great report on ‘Theories of Change’ (see the link below). In it Craig Valters highlights four key principles for making Theories of Change work: 1) focus on process, 2) prioritise learning, 3) be locally led and 4) think compass, not map.
The paper could have been written about Ligada.
In these early days, the space to ask questions has enabled us to prioritise learning and develop our compass, recognising we need to know more about how to navigate this work rather than assume we just need to draw our map and happily plot from A to B. The long inception phase, and our physical location, has given us the chance to focus on process, make connections and ensure that we create the right mechanisms to be locally led.
So, a few weeks in, and I think this programme is brilliant and feel privileged to work on it. There will doubtless be frustrations, but this is how we will learn and adapt. I feel confident that we are putting in place the foundations and genuinely remarkable programme. And yes, it might be the elation talking, but I suspect not.
]]>I had only met Elizabeth once before: in May, when Grant Shapps came to Tanzania. We went to Elizabeth’s house because she had just had a small solar panel fitted to her roof by Off-Grid Electric (OGE), supported by DFID. Her story, of how this technology transformed her life, inspired the Energy Africa campaign which Grant Shapps launched yesterday.
At one level, Elizabeth’s story is a simple one. A solar panel on her roof and a clean cookstove mean her grandchildren can now study at night, she doesn’t have to pay for expensive and dirty kerosene for lighting and she uses a lot less firewood for cooking. Elizabeth spoke softly, but powerfully, to me about how these small things have completely transformed her life and given her peace of mind.
And that’s what the Energy Africa campaign is about: creating millions more stories like Elizabeth’s. Energy can help create jobs, provide security, boost food production and increase incomes. Importantly, renewables can also help mitigate climate change (60% of greenhouse gas emmissions come from energy). But across Africa 600 million people are without access. Global Goal 7 has set us the challenge of getting affordable and clean energy to them.
So how do we do it? If you’ve read my previous blogs, you’ll know that I try to avoid simple plans. Rarely are there easy answers in development. But the story of how that solar panel found its way onto Elizabeth’s roof is enlightening.
First, there is the ‘demand’. Over 80% of the 45 million people in Tanzania have no access to electricity. In rural areas, that increases to around 95%. Nor is this likely to change anytime soon. As I’ve blogged previously, when people are spread out over vast distances, the costs of reaching them are very high. The Tanzanian government estimates the cost of an on-grid connection in rural areas to be around $650. That is prohibitive, especially when your customers can’t afford the $110 connection fee.
Second, the technology. In 1977, solar power cost $76.67 per watt. Since then, the price has dropped a hundred-fold to $0.74 per watt. And the innovations keep coming, for example in lithium batteries and LED lights.
In parallel, East Africa has been at the vanguard of mobile phone payment systems like M-Pesa. In Tanzania, in 2009 only 1.1% of people used mobile money. By 2013, it was 49.9%. Today, the proportion will be even higher.
So millions of people wanting electricity but unable to access it, much cheaper solar power and people increasingly able to use mobile money to make payments... cue the entrepreneur.
Into this market has burst a group of young, dynamic companies offering a range of innovative, household solar products.
OGE is one such company. The system Elizabeth uses has a one-off installation fee of 12,000 shillings (£3.75) followed by a 9,000 shilling (£2.80) monthly payment to keep the system activated. This M-Power system provides enough electricity to run the lights all night. If the system breaks down, OGE will fix it so the maintenance challenge is dealt with. And, after 3 years, the whole system will become Elizabeth's to own and run for free.
Alongside OGE are several other companies offering variations on the technology or financing terms: M-Kopa, Azuri Technologies, Mobisol, Zara Solar and Ensol to name a few. Importantly, most of these companies are founded, managed and employ young people and, in the case of Solar Sister, young women.
The potential market is huge. Across Africa, sales have tripled in the last three years providing affordable and clean lighting for 35 million people in rural areas.
So with such a dynamic market, why do we need Energy Africa? That’s where the final piece of the puzzle comes in. OGE wouldn’t have gone to Magu district as quickly as they did without an added incentive. That incentive came from DFID and other donors. Essentially, we offered a payment to any company that could reach a certain number of households in remote areas.
Energy Africa is about how we bring all these different elements together and bend the curve to achieve Global Goal 7. There are opportunities abound. Even going beyond the 600million households, imagine solar power for rural clinics: doctors no longer having to perform surgery at night using just the light off their mobile phones. Or in small businesses: the local barber using solar power for his hair clippers, instead of a costly and polluting generator. Or in schools: children able to take solar lamps home so they too can study at night. The possibilities are endless. The future is bright.
So when I think of Elizabeth’s story, it reminds me that development comes in all shapes and sizes and small things can make a big difference. But it also gives hope to the very real prospect of Africa leading the world on off-grid, rural solar power. That vision, of a country like Tanzania, harnessing the combined power of its climate, its young people and its entrepreneurial spirit is wonderfully exciting.
]]>Resources are scarce for these four and five year olds too, there’s only enough workbooks to share one between three and even tables and chairs are in incredibly short supply.
The kids that I met in those hot, dark classes were desperate to learn and have such big dreams for their futures, but they are really struggling to get the education that they desperately need to be able to achieve them and escape the poverty trap they find themselves in.
Thankfully wonderful schoolchildren across the UK have helped their fellow pupils by baking, dancing and dressing-up for Red Nose Day to give thousands of children across Africa a brighter future. What’s more the UK government provided £10 million, which included doubling all of the money raised by schools across the UK, so that twice as many children could gain access to essential learning.
I’m American but all of the amazing Red Nose Day fundraising efforts make me so proud to live in Britain - and the way that money is being used to change young lives is truly incredible.
In Ghana I saw an organisation called The Sabre Trust training hundreds of teachers like Dora, 25, to use play and activity in their lessons to really engage these little ones and feed their desire to learn.
Even though Dora is left-handed, when she was at school she was forced to write with her right hand, something which Dora still struggles to understand.
But her own experiences have made her passionate about ensuring young people can express themselves freely. In her own classroom in the rural village of Dwabor learning is fun and children are allowed to explore the space and express themselves. There are no rows of desks and each subject is taught through various games and activities.
Sabre also encourages teachers to be creative about their lack of resources, teaching them to make the things that they can’t afford to buy using recycled items from around the home.
Dora’s class is a vibrant room decorated with paper chains which are hung across the ceiling and the walls are covered with colourful, hand-made posters, from numbers to the alphabet.
I helped the children to use old bottle tops to spell out their names and we also practiced our numbers, buying and selling from a pretend shop which was stocked with empty bottles and cartons. Teachers discipline children by giving them time out from play and rewarding good behaviour.
The pupils were in total awe of the best-behaved boy who sat like the king of the room on a chair covered in coloured paper and with a crown on his head, reading to the rest of the class.
I met several inspirational teachers while I was in Ghana, but Dora was incredible. Her patience with the children was remarkable and I love everything that she stands for. Teachers old and new have embraced this new interactive, child-centred form of learning and recognise that it could be exactly what Ghana needs to help transform an entire generation of young people.
As well as a great education, what teachers like Dora are also bringing to these kids is a fascination and love for life. I really hope that my daughter Willow gets a teacher like her when she starts school.
Those adorable young kids I met in Ghana were so desperate to learn and fulfil the huge expectations their parents have for their little lives. A good kindergarten education, thanks to the amazing training your fundraising and the UK Government money is funding, will set them up to achieve the results they need in school to be escape poverty for good.
]]>After hours spent on the road from Bamyan, the neighbouring province, I discovered a village in the mountains of Ghor, where cars have to park at the bottom of a hill and passengers walk up to a community of mud houses, accompanied on their journey by sheep and turkeys. It’s a place where the teacher confuses the pictures for the words cherry and apricot during an English lesson because neither he, nor any of the students, have ever seen these fruits.
It is so remote that it has never had a school. The sixty families who live there had never had access to education until the STAGES project opened two community-based classes. Children followed in the footsteps of their parents, herding sheep, growing subsistence crops and helping with housework. Yet when the project explained that that it wanted to establish classes, the community immediately accepted, understanding the value of education from the start. Five community members volunteered for the school management committee and organised the community to clean and repair a space in the mosque for classes. Today, 20 children attend a community based primary class and 27 teenage girls are enrolled in accelerated learning classes where they study two grades in one year.
Abdul Rahman, a small wizened man with lively eyes is waiting for me in his home where he has provided a room for the community library, with books provided through the STAGES project. This year the village holds the record amongst the NGO’s focus communities for the most books borrowed, with some 2,000 books borrowed during the winter.
In spite of the challenging context, the village pooled its resources to build their own school. “Before, people didn’t work together to improve the community, so I decided to become a school management committee member to help coordinate activities and bring change,” Abdul explains. He decided to visit each family to convince them to help build a school: “It wasn’t difficult to convince people because every family has children. Education is everyone’s concern.” School management committee members collected money to rent a tractor to bring stones to the building site and the community organised shifts of ten people to build the foundation and raise walls. Everyone in the community helped, donating materials, bringing water and food for the workers or contributing their labour.
Abdul Rahman proudly takes me to the building site. Everyone is at work mixing mud and passing it to the men perched on top of the walls. The school will have three rooms; one for the primary class, one for the accelerated learning class and one for the library. Walking on the walls, I can appreciate the size of the building and the sense of great hope the community has for the future of Afghanistan. The potential of the people and what education can help them achieve is clear.
As part of STAGES project and to encourage ownership of classes established, communities have to donate classroom and library space as well as shura volunteer time. Sometimes communities decide to go the extra mile and donate books, repair material for classes or even build wells or school buildings such as the one observed in Ghor. The project has already recorded £735,267 of in kind contributions, demonstrating Afghans’ overwhelming engagement in the education of their children and their commitment to build a better future.
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Please note, this is a guest blog. Views expressed here do not necessarily represent the views of DFID or have the support of the British government.
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]]>This day is an opportunity to raise awareness of the different types of discrimination and abuse many girls around the world face. As we mark this day, our promise must be to ensure girls worldwide survive, thrive, learn, reach their full potential and achieve their dreams, thereby unleashing their latent power.
The International Day promotes girls’ rights and highlights gender inequalities that remain between girls and boys. These inequalities are played out in many ways. One example is the practice of Female Genital Mutilation (FGM).
Today more than 125 million girls and women have undergone FGM globally, and over 3 million more are at risk annually. FGM is an extreme expression of gender-based inequality and a form of gender-based violence, as the UN recognised in its 2012 resolution calling for its global elimination.
Despite this resolution, and almost 30 years after the fight against FGM started, the practice remains a global issue and most prevalent in Africa, where it is still practiced in 29 countries. FGM affects children, women and adolescents. Adolescents like 15-year-old Lisa, who went through it at age 8.
I met Lisa at a conference and we started talking about her experiences over lunch. She discussed the pain she endured, and the dreams and hopes lost by her and so many others. But 2 years ago, Lisa joined a youth network fighting for the rights of young women in her community. She knows she is relatively lucky now, being back in school while many of her friends were married off after undergoing FGM.
She talked about the role young women like her can play in supporting other young women. At her young age, she vows to be a defender of her peers who have undergone FGM and those at risk. Through her work in the network, she has helped rescue girls from FGM. She has restored their dreams and their dignity.
As we separated, Lisa’s parting words to me were: “The power of change begins with us”. As I mulled over that remark, I realized we cannot fight inequalities if we don’t include the Lisas of this world.
Lisa speaks to the very essence of The Girl Generation, a DFID-funded social change initiative that provides a global platform for galvanising, catalysing and amplifying the Africa-led movement to end FGM. Young people are the heart and soul of this movement. They provide the inspiration for The Girl Generation. They are the future parents, leaders and critical actors in ending FGM in their generation. We believe they have the power to galvanize the change they want to see.
This year, as we join other leaders around the world to celebrate the power of the adolescent girl, I celebrate Lisa. Let us echo the UN promise to Lisa that we will harness her power so that together we bring an end to the discrimination and violence against girls.
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Please note, this is a guest blog. Views expressed here do not necessarily represent the views of DFID or have the support of the British government.
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