Interview: Launch of Learning from Practice series
‘Together we’ve learnt so much on topics that often fall through the cracks of research’
The UN Trust Fund to End Violence against Women (UN Trust Fund) is collaborating with 100+ grantee civil society and women’s rights organizations as well as external researchers to co-produce a series of knowledge products on 10 themes on preventing violence against women and girls. This series, which focuses on practice-based learning, aims to inform the wider ending violence against women community.
We spoke with Gemma Wood, Monitoring & Evaluation and Knowledge Manager at the UN Trust Fund, about the project.
What is practice-based learning and why is it important?
For the UN Trust Fund, practice-based learning is the cumulative knowledge of our community of grantees. After 25 years of investing in civil society organizations to end violence against women and girls, we see an enormous wealth of knowledge in our grantees’ monitoring and evaluation reports. This series of knowledge products are a way to systematically elevate these practice-based lessons to make them as widely accessible as possible.
We see this as very important to complementing existing research on what works with the practical how and why it works or doesn’t work. We have drawn a lot of inspiration from the work of our partner organizations such as Raising Voices and other feminist organizations in the global South who have been championing this practice for decades.
How did you select the 10 themes of this series?
A lot of inputs went into the selection of the themes and I invite you to read the full methodology here. In a nutshell, the themes are those that grantees and researchers want more information on, based on what others do on the ground.
They were selected through several rounds of participatory engagement with the UN Trust Fund’s grantees and advisory committees of over 250 practitioners and researchers — in English, French and Spanish.
It’s been quite a journey! Together we’ve learnt so much on topics that often fall through the cracks of research, such as how to manage everyday resistance and backlash to projects that are fundamentally disruptive to the status quo, how to prevent violence by tackling the root cause of violence, how to apply an intersectional lens to these projects from the get-go, and how to remain adaptive and agile.
Why is the information so important to preventing violence against women and girls?
It is important that we all critically engage with this body of knowledge because violence against women is still devastatingly pervasive. Globally 1 in 3 women report physical or sexual violence by an intimate partner or non-partner — and this number remains unchanged. The pandemic has dealt a further blow, reversing some of the progress that had been made over the past few decades. At the same time, we know that violence is preventable, so it is critical that we learn from the work of organizations that have been doing the work on the front lines for decades.
The very process of co-creating these products has been informative (some say therapeutic!) for the community participating in it — i.e. our own team and the wider community including UN Women, researchers and most of all the practitioners from diverse contexts and organizations.
The process is the start of a conversation on prevention practice that we hope to continue. In the coming months, we will host a series of webinars and consultations on the 10 themes with a wider audience on our new community platform — so watch this space!
What lessons have emerged so far?
We are learning a lot about the themes, some corroborating what we knew from research already, some challenging the same. We have found really interesting cross-cutting lessons as well — for example on how different types of organizations find common ground and work together towards preventing violence against women and girls.
We are also learning how important it is to invest in practice-based learning at an organizational level, especially for smaller grassroots organizations that produce important insights on preventing violence in their day-to-day work, which are often undocumented.
Do any examples stand out for you?
An example that really stayed with me was from grantee Fundación Mundubat in Colombia, an indigenous-led organization. Rather than seeing tradition and culture as antagonistic, they draw on traditional practices as a wellspring for creating culturally relevant prevention and response accompaniments to their programming. They offer lessons on framing culture as a positive resource for prevention. They also provide important lessons on going beyond treating women and girls as beneficiaries of the project, to seeing them as embodying histories of both violence and of resilience and healing.
Accessing the Learning from Practice series
Click here to read the first brief, which focuses on working with faith-based and traditional leaders to prevent violence against women and girls. We will be releasing the remainder of the 10 knowledge products over the next year alongside a series of webinars.
Please check out our website for more details and do contact us for feedback and information. We invite and encourage dialogue and discussion to ensure that we continue to learn from each other in the pursuit of ending violence against women and girls once and for all!
