Browse by Theme: Engaging Men & Boys

As the USA inaugurates a new president in an atmosphere of heightened security in the wake of shocking violence at the Capitol earlier this month, the partners CARE works with in Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Kosovo, and Serbia are celebrating some of the successes they have had running programmes to counter violent extremism, especially with young men.

“He always came home late and drunk and he often kicked the door open while hurling insults at me and the children. I became such a miserable person.... After a number of curriculum sessions, I started to notice a change of heart in my husband, he started taking responsibility for the family needs.... He even went ahead to open up a joint account for us.” (Quote by a project participant – but not from Olive who is pictured above.) Intimate partner violence (IPV) is the most common form of violence against women and girls – but our Indashyikirwa project in Rwanda proved there are ways to change this: by supporting couples to build healthier, more equitable relationships, and by helping communities to challenge and address the values which normalise violence.

The example of Minakshi, a former child bride who has gone to become an activist and community-level facilitator for CARE’s Tipping Point project, is a reminder and inspiration for all development workers that real change is personal. We cannot work on projects seeking to shift harmful social norms without ongoing self-reflection around our own attitudes to gender and power, write Tirzah Brown and Yuleidy Merida.

Schoolkids in Benin started hosting plays and events to talk about the dangers of child marriage, and community leaders listened. Leaders are now 26% less likely to actively promote child marriage than they were at the beginning of CARE’s TEMPS project. Success like this gives us hope for the future—we can stop child marriage for everyone.

This week marks the one year anniversary of #MeToo, and the subsequent #AidToo movement. This transformed the global conversation, and put this critical issue high on the public agenda. I for one hope it stays there until we as a society and we as an industry overcome the power imbalances and gender inequality that underpin sexual exploitation, abuse and harassment.

In Zimbabwe, mothers and school management worked to improve girls’ academic achievement through the Improving Girls’ Access through Transforming Education programme (IGATE). When you ask girls what they liked best about the initiative, many of them will tell you about the emergency skirt.

Women in Malawi say that being able to open their own bank account or save with a VSLA has caused their husbands to be more engaged.