SDG5 aims to end all forms of discrimination against women and girls and eliminate all forms of violence and harmful practices. Achieving these goals requires a comprehensive understanding of the gender and social norms that perpetuate gender inequality and using that understanding to design interventions that better address sustainable transformative social change.
The programme
To support this change, Itad worked with DFID Nigeria’s flagship gender equality programme, V4C, which aimed to create a stronger enabling environment for the empowerment of young women. The programme worked to change people’s attitudes and practices towards women standing for leadership positions, women’s role in decision-making, and violence against girls and women. It was designed and implemented over five years from October 2012 to September 2017, with a budget of over £26 million.
The approach
V4C was conceptualised as a programme to learn about what works for social norms change at scale. The programme adopted an adaptive approach to programming and reoriented programme strategies where they were not achieving results. To drive learning, the programme put in place a robust monitoring system, which included a population representative longitudinal survey of changes in young people’s attitudes and behaviours, a study of how attitude and behaviour change happens and surveys to track audience response to communications outreach. The survey, one of the first of its kind globally, used a difference in differences design to understand the likely contribution made by V4C to recorded changes in gender attitudes and behaviours.
Image © Itad_V4C
