Implementing Multiple Gender Strategies to Improve HIV and ... - ICRW

Child Security Project in South Africa are both good examples of this approach. In these
programs, men participate in group workshops and dialogues that promote understanding of
gender norms as an underlying cause of violence, and are encouraged to develop violence
prevention strategies for themselves and their communities. In the South Africa Shosholoza AIDS
Project, for example, young men who play soccer in clubs were recruited to participate in skillsbuilding
workshops focused on gender norms. These young men subsequently initiated forums
with other soccer players to talk about what constitutes forced sex and what they could do to
eliminate it.
5. Increasing women’s legal protection was the least developed of the four gender strategies.
Increasing women’s legal protection was addressed by 19 of 31 programs and was most
commonly used as a complement to reducing violence and coercion. Compared with other
strategies, this was the least developed; it typically was addressed indirectly, through referrals to
the police or legal service organizations, rather than as a central program initiative. The most
developed initiatives in this area addressed legal literacy, which was promoted through care and
support services. The Uganda Memory Book program, for example, helps families prepare
themselves for the death of a family member from AIDS through will-writing and helping parents
understand how to legally protect their loved ones’ land rights. Some programs, such as Nigeria’s
Community Care in Nigeria program, coordinates with state agencies and community institutions
to establish Protection Committees to address issues of violence and inheritance matters as well
as to advocate for access to social services and the rights of women and children. Few programs,
however, included robust legal service provision or advocacy for women’s legal rights. This may
be because programs that focus explicitly on increasing women’s legal protection do not do so in
combination with other gender strategies, and thus were not captured in this compendium. One
notable exception is the Kenya Nuru ya Jamii program, which addresses all four gender
strategies as well as the three types of HIV programming. This program trained community
members to become mediators in Alternative Dispute Resolution. These mediators helped to
resolve civil disagreements at the community level and ensure appropriate referrals were made to
law enforcement.
STRENGTHENING GENDER STRATEGIES
6. Community involvement and participatory approaches may contribute significantly to
program sustainability. Program sustainability can be difficult to define and measure because
many factors contribute to it, including cost of operation, level of skill required to implement the
program, matching of program objectives with a community’s perceived needs, and investment by
stakeholders in the program’s success. Furthermore, most of the programs included in the
compendium do not yet have long enough track records to draw definitive lessons about what
characterizes sustainable program models. For this compendium, we rated programs on the
extent to which community members were involved in the design, implementation and resourcing
of their programs, as one indication of potential sustainability. We hypothesized that greater
degrees of community involvement would result in greater likelihood of program sustainability
because community buy-in is a crucial component of addressing sensitive issues around HIV and
gender norms and sustaining changes around these norms. Although there was no way to test
this hypothesis, in reporting their key findings and “lessons learned” many programs spoke about
the importance of community buy-in and even ownership in making their programs feasible to
implement over time. Facilitating this type of ownership is not always easy, however. As staff from
the Uganda SASA! program write, “Community members are used to having nongovernmental
organizations (NGOs) take the lead and act as experts. Some community members find it
unusual and difficult to become the activists and drivers of change.”
Despite these challenges, most projects enthusiastically embraced very active involvement of
community members. For programs whose objectives included women’s empowerment,
involvement of program beneficiaries in planning and implementation was a logical and
necessary component of their work. As the Uganda Mama’s Club program found, “We have
learned that women need to be involved in decisions affecting their lives and need to be part of
designing the programs that affect them.” Similarly, the Uganda Family and Community
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