Generating Knowledge and Evidence on the Prevention of Violence against Women: An Introductory Guide for African Women's Organisations

"African feminist knowledge-creation situates its work within the complexity and diversity of African contexts and is committed to intersectionality and the transformation of injustices in all African-based people's lives."

Feminist organisations across Africa play a critical role in building strategies to prevent violence against women (VAW). Finding effective ways to strengthen the capacity to understand, use, and generate knowledge and evidence is crucial to guiding VAW prevention activists' efforts. According to the African Women's Development Fund (AWDF), consensus on this evidence supports the creation of programmes that facilitate sustainable shifts in behaviour, power relations, and gender norms. To support this process, AWDF created a guide to share practical steps related to the production, ethics, and dissemination of VAW prevention knowledge and evidence.

Specifically, the guide:

• Describes key terminology, methods, tools, and approaches for evidence generation and knowledge production in the field of VAW prevention;
• Broadens the conceptualisation (beyond an earlier guide, at Related Summaries below, produced with Raising Voices in 2019) to encourage more African feminist knowledge and evidence production and sharing in VAW prevention; and
• Provides steps and strategies that activists, feminists, and African women's organisations can integrate into their efforts to advance knowledge and evidence-based VAW prevention.

As noted here: "Most critical to feminist knowledge and evidence generation is sharing with women and communities involved in the process of its creation. It recognises women as experts and co-producers of VAW knowledge rather than merely as individuals from whom data is extracted....Women's rights organisations and activists can produce and circulate VAW prevention knowledge and evidence directly in community events to launch and discuss findings, produce information sheets, hold radio talk shows, and produce visual formats like short films or comics for audiences that may find these more accessible."

According to AWDF, this guide serves to honour the multitude of types of knowledge that African women continue to create, the process of creating and producing them, and those who make them. It hopes to ensure the continued building of interventions that are well informed, confident, and in solidarity with one another, despite activists' different contexts on the continent and beyond.