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In Niger, the Spotlight Initiative programme set up a mentorship programme in safe spaces to strengthen the capacities and skills of out-of-school or never-schooled, married or unmarried adolescent girls aged 15-19. A comprehensive mentorship guide and curriculum was developed covering the following areas across 28 sessions:
Life skills: Self-awareness, self-esteem and emotional management; values and behaviours; decision-making, problem-solving and negotiations; leadership, communication and organisations skills and team-working.
Reproductive health: Women's reproductive system…
In Belize, the Spotlight Initiative programme made significant advances in strengthening and scaling up Comprehensive Sexuality Education (CSE) at the secondary school level through a partnership with the Ministry of Education. The CSE was revised to meet international standards and scaled up to all secondary schools, sharing important anti-VAWG messages.
"CSE training is inclusive and open to everyone and addressed sexual education for all genders and orientations." - Community-level Peer Educator in Belize City
However, not all adolescents and youth attend school. In an effort to…
In Uganda, Spotlight Initiative supported the SASA! Together – a community mobilisation approach that supports communities to create positive and sustainable changes in the norms that perpetuate violence against women and girls. SASA! Together is a revised version of the original SASA! Approach, developed by the Ugandan NGO Raising Voices. New features of SASA! Together include a distinct focus on intimate partner violence, strategies that reach across the whole community, and more support for organisations and communities to sustain change.
The SASA! Together methodology focuses on…
Spotlight Initiative, in consortia with World Vision and the national CSO Psychosocial Recovery and Development in East Timor (PRADET), designed and tested a model for empowering and providing psychosocial support to girls and adolescents who are survivors or at risk of sexual gender-based violence (GBV) in Timor-Leste. The process was informed by a mapping exercise in Ermera municipality, which sought to identify specialised survivor-centred services for adolescents outside of the capital, and involved 1,049 adolescents (522 boys and 527 girls) who provided insights on their specific sexual…
The Safe Space Mentorship Programme (SSMP) in Malawi supports gender equitable social norms, attitudes and behavioural change at community and individual levels. Supporting girls and young women from 10 to 24 years old, SSMP is a weekly programme that runs for 6 months addressing gender perspectives, sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR), gender-based violence (GBV), harmful practices, referral pathways, and life skills from a rights-based perspective. Its purpose is to empower young women and girls to recognise that violence is illegal, how it violates their basic human rights, and…
In 2022, the Spotlight Initiative Latin America Regional Programme was able to map and collect more than 600 gender-based violence prevention strategies from 18 countries, generating important recommendations on effective GBV prevention strategies. Some of the recommendations include:
Reinforcing critical approaches, intersectional analysis, and taking a multicultural dimension
Identifying conditions and barriers of access to information and state actions and policies
Enhancing sustainability and scaling up of processes, and leadership that promotes the building of social norms that…
The Spotlight Initiative programme in Liberia developed a Comprehensive Prevention Strategy for the prevention of sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) and harmful practices through a coordinated and multi-stakeholder partnership. It is the first comprehensive prevention strategy in the region and in Africa which is:
Informed by a literature review and a participatory approach to primary and secondary data collection and analysis to assess risk and protective factors; engaging stakeholders at national, county and community levels including Government ministries, law enforcement, the…
All Spotlight Initiative programmes adopted a comprehensive theory of change and worked across all the Spotlight Initiative pillars to develop a comprehensive VAWG programme. The approach taken by Spotlight Initiative Mozambique was as follows:
To support legislation and policies to end VAWG (pillar 1), the Spotlight Initiative worked with the Government of Mozambique to reinforce legislation and policies and develop multiple legal and policy instruments. These instruments included the Multi-sectoral Mechanism for Prevention, Reporting, Referral and Response to Violence Against Children at…
Civil Society Reference Groups (CSRGs) have been formed at the national, regional and global levels to advise, monitor and hold Spotlight Initiative programmes accountable to women, girls and feminist movements. As a reflection of participatory monitoring, national CRSGs have developed independent scorecards to monitor Spotlight Initiative’s processes and systems, with a focus on civil society participation in programme design, access to funding, and engagement in implementation, among other areas. The scorecards, and approach to the scorecard, represents an increasingly (participatory) way…
The Niger Civil Society Reference Group (CSRG) have implemented and tested various PME approaches to assess national programme results. Through monitoring visits conducted in all four target provinces in-country, members of the CSRG have listened to the stories of women and girls served by Spotlight Initiative, learning more about their expectations and hopes. In a safe and secure environment, Civil Society Reference Group members transformed “programme beneficiaries” into valuable advisers and agents of change. For example, the National CRSG conducted independent monitoring using the Civil…