Technical and Learning Support to East Africa Partners Working to End Sexual Violence against Children

ICRW in partnership with Pathfinder International -Tanzania, Action Aid-Tanzania, CSEMA – Tanzania and Uganda partner Bantwana Initiative Uganda is implementing a child sexual violence prevention multi country project in Uganda and Tanzania.

The project is focused on strengthening the capacity of implementing partners to monitor program implementation, document and disseminate programme outcomes/impact and advance policy shifts. In this intervention, ICRW is co-designing and pilot testing partner’s interventions aimed at shifting gender norms on child sexual abuse in Zanzibar and Western Uganda. As part of institutional strengthening, ICRW provides technical support on program implementation and monitoring, engagement in policy and advocacy at district, national and regional levels.

Key Engagements in the project include:

• Support in strengthening the program’s design and child sexual abuse prevention intervention components
• Technical assistance to strengthen monitoring, evaluation and learning systems and support implementation
• Technical assistance to strengthen documentation and effective research uptake
• Measure the efficacy of the initiatives in reducing child sexual abuse

Building on ICRW’s research and advocacy on child marriage which contributed to child marriage legislation in several contexts, ICRW Africa, advanced work on child sexual abuse (CSA) in Zanzibar, Tanzania, and Western Uganda.

In 2022, ICRW Africa began providing technical assistance to project partners, including Pathfinder International Tanzania, Action Aid Tanzania, Csema, and Western Uganda Bantwana Program (WUBP), to ensure evidence-based CSA prevention programming.

Recognizing that social norms promote silence on CSA in the project areas, the project partners anticipated that breaking long-held practices would be difficult. Addressing CSA in these settings called for contextually relevant solutions.

Consequently, ICRW Africa conducted a social norm mapping exercise to inform research on the social drivers of CSA in Western Uganda and Zanzibar. The mapping exercise assisted program partners in establishing the conceptual foundation for their work.

ICRW Africa and partners co-designed transformative innovations to address CSA in the project areas, bringing the work closer to the community. We also conducted baseline studies prior to intervention implementation in Western Uganda and Zanzibar to inform the evaluation of CSA solutions and answer the ‘what works’ question in preventing child CSA.