Raising Voices

Raising Voices reduces rates of intimate partner violence across Uganda (and hopes to expand to additional countries in sub-Saharan Africa), by creating evidence-based violence prevention programs and supporting local activists to use these methodologies.

What problem are they trying to solve?

• Around one third of women have experienced physical or sexual intimate partner violence within their lifetime.¹
• Experiencing intimate partner violence violates that person’s human rights, and impacts the victim's mental, physical and economic health. Witnessing violence in the home may also limit children’s developmental potential, through the impact of chronic stress.²
• In Uganda, around 45% of women have experienced physical or sexual violence within their lifetime, and 26% within the last year.³
• Raising Voices works to reduce intimate partner violence in Uganda.

What do they do?

• Raising Voices creates evidence-based violence prevention programs, and supports communities across LMIC in using them. They developed SASA!, which has now been implemented in at least 30 countries and more than 75 organizations.
• SASA! Is a community activist social empowerment program: it is essentially a toolkit for local activists about how to shift harmful social norms within their local communities, to reduce violence against women. The program involves four phases (start, awareness, support and action), including discussion materials and other methods to engage the community. It is based on Raising Voices’ extensive experience in working with local communities to reduce violence against women.
• The SASA! Approach is supported by multiple RCTs (see table below; 80% of the RCTs we found supported this approach).
• Raising Voices are a feminist, intersectional charity who are locally run.

Paper testing community activist social empowerment approach	Length of intervention	Area	Baseline physical IPV rate	Physical IPV rate at follow-up (test group)	Baseline Physical IPV rate (control group)	Physical IPV rate at follow-up (control group)
Abramsky et al. 2014	48 months	Uganda	25%	9% when program ended	21%	22%
Dunkle et al. 2020	24 months	Rwanda	49.8%	34.7% when program ended	41.1%	41.7%
Wagman et al. 2015	24 months	Uganda	17%	15% at 16 months, 12% at 35 months	18%	16% for both follow ups
Ogum Alangea et al. 2020	24 months	Ghana	16.5%	8.3% at program end	14.9%	10.9%
Chatterji et al. 2020	24 months	Rwanda	58.9%	63.1%	50.9%	49.7%

Why do we recommend them?

• SASA! Is the most strongly evidence-backed intervention that we have found in the area of reducing violence against women and girls.
• Raising Voices are a field leader in generating new evidence in this area, and disseminating it to others.
• We think that Raising Voices has room to scale up their programming, for example into West Africa.

What can they do with more funding?

Additional funds will be used to scale up SASA! Programming further, including into new countries in West Africa.

More resources

Raising Voices YouTube channel

Notes

1. Sardinha et al. 2022 ↩

2. See our Violence Against Women and Girls report here ↩

3. Sardinha et al. 2022 ↩