The knowledge, skills and capacity of implementing partners are essential to achieving effective VAWG programme implementation as they work to implement interventions directly with women, children and communities. Therefore, it is essential to develop a well-defined implementation plan that allocates sufficient resources (staff time and budget) and includes capacity development through training, ongoing support and collaboration.

Capacity development requires an effective strategy focusing on strengthening the existing organisational and individual capacities in a collaborative way, fostering quality and meaningful relationships, and mentoring organisations to lead, develop, test, implement and monitor context-specific VAWG prevention programmes.

Read more about how to support capacity building for partners

To implement VAWG interventions effectively, the careful selection, training and support of facilitators who deliver interventions is essential. These individuals are programme role models and play a key role in facilitating critical reflection on gender and violence. Key selection criteria for facilitators include:

• Skills in facilitation and basic counselling
• Gender-equitable and non-violent attitudes and behaviours.
• (Ideally) share demographic characteristics with beneficiaries (e.g. age/gender)
• People who are respected in their communities, so they are able to attract and retain participants and create safe and inclusive spaces.

Training and support for facilitators should be comprehensive, including well-planned, interactive modules, clear guidelines, ongoing supervision, mentorship, supportive feedback, and opportunities to integrate their learning and expertise into programme implementation. Training should be gender transformative – a change process in itself – where facilitators experience the programme as a participant (including reflection on gender, power, privilege, and violence) and are provided with opportunities to practice facilitation in mock sessions and reflect on their practice.

Pre-post training assessments and training facilitator surveys can also help capture lessons learned. The creation of networks and/or communities of practice during training can act as effective bridges between learning spaces and the implementation work after the training ends.

Implementing VAWG programming can be both physically and emotionally demanding. It is likely that staff and/or facilitators will engage with women and girls who are experiencing or have already experienced abuse and may be at severe risk of further harm. Discussing violence can trigger past trauma for both programme participants and the staff working with them. Equally, some participants will need immediate support to cope with ongoing abuse, but options to escape abuse may be limited by a range of social, economic and practical factors and this can be stressful both for the women involved and the staff who want to support them.

In these environments, a focus on the wellbeing, self and collective care of both participants and staff is crucial, with funding allocated to support wellbeing. Organisations should train staff to respond appropriately to disclosures of abuse, including any legal requirements to report the abuse of children or vulnerable adults, and establish referral pathways to professional health, legal, and psychosocial services.

In addition, it is important for organisations to create safe spaces for staff to regularly share experiences, process emotions, and release tensions. Ongoing support is essential to prevent stress, reduced motivation, and burnout among staff. Some programmes have also found it useful to procure psychosocial first aid services to handle sensitive issues disclosed by community members and/or to support staff, facilitators and programme participants.

Programming to prevent VAWG needs to be sufficiently intensive to achieve transformative change. One-off or ad-hoc training and awareness-raising sessions are not effective; instead, evidence shows the importance of reaching enough participants on a structured and repeated basis to facilitate changes in attitudes, behaviours and norms.

Approaches need to enable a comprehensive exploration of different topics related to violence, such as gender norms, family relations, financial management, and effective communication. They need to invest the time and resources to enable participants to engage in critical reflection, skills building and practice, and to take action. Participants benefit from consistent interactions with the same people over time, develop trusting relationships to support change and mutual accountability, and allow time for transformation.

This can be done through workshop or curriculum-based interventions, which usually need to comprise at least weekly 12-15 sessions of 2-3 hours or more (40-50 hours total) to enable in-depth discussions, recall of the previous session and a period for reflection and experiential learning. Building in take-home tasks and ongoing group or mentoring support is also important. This can also be achieved through community mobilisation approaches where a sufficient number of community activists relative to the target population, engage in repeated, ongoing and systematic engagement with programme participants.

VAWG programmes aim to shift gender and power inequalities and therefore can lead to backlash from community members, men and power holders – such as resistance, controlling behaviours and/or further violence. Practitioners often encounter some form of resistance in their day-to-day experiences of working in this space: institutional inertia, denial of support for feminist work, pushback on “progressive” feminist agendas, or attacks on civil society spaces.

Therefore, all programmes should establish a project risk matrix and monitoring system, including participant feedback surveys, satisfaction surveys and progress reports, to identify, track and manage risks (including unequal gender norms), consider how these risks might interact with the programme, monitor and address any unintended consequences (including whether the programme is exacerbating violence against women and their children) or resistance and implement mitigation strategies as part of adopting a Do No Harm approach.

Backlash and escalation of violence can be prevented, monitored for, and reduced by ensuring partnerships are built with key stakeholders and buy-in is achieved in advance, creating Information, Education and Communication (IEC) materials to explain programme benefits and tailoring messaging for different groups and, recognising people have different goals and needs hence their readiness and willingness to change will be difficult.

Even the most well-designed VAWG programmes can be thrown off course by unforeseen events like the COVID-19 pandemic, conflict situations, or humanitarian emergencies. These external shocks can have a profound impact on programme activities and can exacerbate violence against women and girls in target communities, as was the case in many Spotlight Initiative country programmes during COVID-19. It is therefore important to ensure that programmes can adapt, innovate and pivot to respond to shifting needs, including building the capacity and resilience of programme actors to adapt to these contextual shifts.

Being adaptable means putting women and girls' experiences at the centre of programmes and modifying approaches to reach women and girls. For instance, organisations with access to resources can adapt their methodologies to create online versions and innovate with digital solutions to address the acute needs of women and girls. However, the digital divide is still present across the world, and questions of access, agency, inclusivity, safety and participation in online spaces need to be considered. It is critical for funding to be flexible and made available for grassroots women’s rights organisations to innovate, operate effectively and safely as well as to deliver locally contextualised violence prevention programmes.