An interview with Raising Voices
By Allie Glinski, ICRW

Photo credit: ©Raising Voices / Heidi Brady
Raising Voices is a nonprofit organization based in Kampala, Uganda working toward the prevention of violence against women and violence against children. Their approach focuses on holistic programming that influences the power dynamics shaping relationships between women and men, girls and boys.
Raising Voices’ work is organized around three core pillars – practice, learning and influence:
- Practice – Over the past twelve years, Raising Voices has experimented and tested creative approaches to shift harmful social norms and prevent violence. At its core, the practice component is about cultivating an impassioned form of activism—one that can awaken critical thinking and catalyze changes in relationships, homes, schools and communities.
- Learning – Their learning component aims to nurture a culture of curiosity, reflection and action that can distill and synthesize lessons to evolve their programming and inspire further innovation in the prevention field.
- Influence – Raising Voices understands influencing as the ability to shape perspectives and analysis at various levels – organizational, regional and global. Through their publications, advocacy groups and presence at various forums, they infuse discourse with feminist values and a grounded understanding of what it takes to effectively prevent violence in practice.

Photo credit: ©Raising Voices / Heidi Brady
One of Raising Voices’ most significant achievements is the development, rigorous evaluation and scale-up of the SASA! approach to violence prevention.
The SASA! Activist Kit is a community mobilization approach designed to address a core driver of violence against women and HIV: the imbalance of power between women and men. SASA!’s work is currently being used in more than 20 countries around the world by more than 65 organizations.
Since 2013, the International Center for Research on Women (ICRW) has partnered with Raising Voices in a monitoring and evaluation (M&E) capacity building project. While Raising Voices has a strong focus on organizational learning and strengthening, and had rigorous monitoring systems for different program-level activities, they wanted to institute an organizational system that pulled together activities and outcomes across all of their areas of work.
We caught of up Raising Voices’ Lori Michau, Co-director and Co-founder, and Sophie Namy, the Learning Coordinator, to ask how the work is going and how it’s impacting the communities they serve.