Beyond awareness: Changing social norms to prevent violence against women and girls

For Debora Monchari Nyambane, preventing violence against women and girls requires more than raising awareness. It means challenging social norms, engaging men and boys, and working to embed change in local policies and government structures.

Union, unity and coming together. These are the meanings of muungano, a Swahili word that gives its name to the Muungano Gender Forum, a project implemented by the International Solidarity Foundation (ISF) in Kenya’s Kisii and Nyamira counties.

Established almost a decade ago, the grassroots forums were created to bring forward the needs and priorities of women whose concerns were not being heard at county level. Since then, they have provided spaces for communities to discuss gender equality, with a particular focus on preventing violence against women and girls.

Deborah Monchari Nyambane, ISF’s project manager for Muungano Gender Forum, recently took part in a training course titled Understanding Violence Prevention Essentials Violence against Women and girls, a course offered at the Violence Prevention Academy, alongside more than 50 professionals from around the world. The training offered new perspectives on how to make violence prevention more effective and how to move from raising awareness towards lasting social change.

From awareness to changing social norms

One of Monchari Nyambane’s key takeaways was the need to identify strategies that work for different groups and to understand how changes in social norms influence programme planning.

“I personally learned how to identify different strategies that work for different groups in violence prevention”, she begins. “I learned how to document social norms and behaviour changes as well as how they influence our general programming. I also learned how to develop policies aligning to the violence prevention strategies that we’ve identified.”

For Monchari Nyambane, this learning reinforces the importance of being more deliberate about the changes a project aims to achieve and the approaches it chooses to pursue.

“If you transform norms, it will be better than just raising awareness.”

The challenge is not simply to reach more people with information, but to understand what needs to change and how that change can be supported over time.

Engaging men and boys as allies

Preventing violence against women and girls also requires engaging men and boys in the process of change. Monchari Nyambane highlights the importance of involving them as allies and change agents, including in efforts to address the medicalization of female genital mutilation (FGM).

“We must ensure that we bring on board men and boys as allies and as change agents to help us realize this change. For example, in medicalized FGM, we need to learn that some of those who make decisions on the FGM practices are men, but they conduct it on women. So we can’t leave that aside.”

Her reflections underline the importance of examining the roles different people play in sustaining harmful practices and identifying ways to involve them in challenging those practices.

Connecting communities with practical support

Awareness alone cannot address all the barriers women face. Access to financial resources and other services can also be important, particularly for women experiencing violence.

Debora Monchari Nyambane describes how the project seeks to connect communities with existing government services and programmes. For example, when discussing financial inclusion, the project works with representatives of the Women Enterprise Fund to explain the loans available and how women can access them for their own development.

This approach links discussions about rights and equality with practical opportunities for women to strengthen their economic independence.

Monchari Nyambane stresses why that independence matters when a woman is considering leaving an abusive relationship: “How can I support myself so that I’m able to make a move if I want to be out of an abusive relationship? There’s no way I can go if I am not empowered economically.”

Embedding change in policies and institutions

For social change to last, Monchari Nyambane believes it must also be reflected in the structures that shape people’s lives. Muungano Gender Forum works to support county governments in integrating gender equality into policies, government structures and gender-responsive budgets.

“We also try to support the county governments to institutionalize part of what we are saying through policies, through government structures, through gender responsive budgets, so that we don’t only end it at awareness raising.”

The training also encouraged Monchari Nyambane to reflect on how the project itself could become more transformative in its approach to gender equality, from design and implementation to monitoring and reporting.

“I learned more about various methods that we can use to challenge social norms and how even us as an institution, we need to improve the gender continuum from being gender sensitive to a level that we are calling ourselves as transformational.”

She also sees opportunities to strengthen policy work and allocate resources to make gender equality practices more firmly established and sustainable at county level.

“For example, we should have budgets that support the drafting of policies, like now the gender mainstreaming policies at the county level.”

For Muungano Gender Forum, these reflections point towards a broader approach to preventing violence against women and girls: one that brings communities together, engages different groups in change, connects women with practical support and works to ensure that gender equality is reflected in policies and institutions.