Reimagining gender norms for SGBV reduction

Mozambique has one of the most progressive legal frameworks on women's rights in Africa, yet adolescents continue to face silence, stigma, and entrenched gender norms that legitimize violence and curtail their SRHR. These norms often position boys and men as decision-makers in relationships, while girls are expected to remain silent, limiting communication, confidence, and agency. 
To address these barriers, the SHARE project co-designed a gender-transformative SBCC strategy, guided by participatory principles that ensured adolescents, caregivers, teachers, and community leaders contributed to shaping the process. The strategy combined school-based mentorship and comprehensive sexuality education with community dialogues, theatre, road shows, and multi-platform media, ensuring that adolescents' voices were amplified alongside those of key gatekeepers.
Midline outcome-monitoring provides evidence of important shifts. Among adolescents, 88% reported confidence to seek SRHR services, while 76% recognized all non-consensual sexual activity as violence. At the same time, knowledge gaps persist, with only 6% correctly identifying the timing of conception and just 7% of girls reporting confidence to advocate for adolescent rights. 
Caregiver attitudes show marked progress: 94% endorsed adolescent participation in SRHR education, 92.8% supported dedicated services for adolescents, and 91.3% rejected wife beating as acceptable. Teachers also emerged as strong allies, with 81% reporting knowledge of national CSE guidelines, 87% affirming CSE's role in reducing school dropout, and mitigating GBV.
These findings demonstrate that multi-channel, co-designed SBCC can shift gender norms and strengthen intergenerational trust. Continued investment in puberty education, adolescent leadership, and legal awareness remains essential.

Gender-Based Violence (GBV) remains a pervasive challenge in Lesotho's public transport system, where taxis (shared public transport vehicle) and minibuses account for nearly 40% of daily trips in the capital city, Maseru. While these services enable women's mobility and access to economic opportunities, they are often unsafe spaces marked by harassment and abuse. The Tsela-Tšoeu (travel safely) initiative, implemented in Leribe, one of Lesotho's districts, tackles this by engaging taxi marshals, owners, and drivers as GBV prevention champions, working collectively to build safer and more inclusive transport environments.
Using a Social and Behaviour Change Communication (SBCC) approach, Tsela-Tšoeu addresses harmful social norms and attitudes through a three-phased participatory model targeting individual, community, and structural levels. At the individual level, direct beneficiaries including women's groups and community gatekeepers have been capacitated through peer-to-peer trainings and dialogues, with over 10,000 people reached directly and indirectly. Community-wide SBCC campaigns, including drama performances at taxi ranks, interactive radio shows, and visibility materials, make GBV prevention a shared responsibility.
At the structural level, the initiative supported taxi associations in developing internal GBV prevention and accountability mechanisms, embedding change within their governance systems. Co-created with transport leaders, commuters, the Ministry of Public Works, the Traffic Department, and CSOs, Tsela-Tšoeu reframes leadership as shared and change as co-created. Preliminary outcomes show positive shifts in behaviour and reduced harassment, stronger peer accountability, and improved passenger–operator relations demonstrating that community-driven approaches can transform Lesotho's public transport into a safe space.

Girl Effect's campaign on technology-facilitated gender-based violence, in partnership with Radio Mirchi, a leading radio service provider, demonstrates how radio can move beyond broadcasting to become a catalyst for social change. The initiative has reached 45.3 million listeners across four major Indian cities-Mumbai, Delhi, Pune, and Nagpur, showcasing the medium's ability to combine scale and trust to spark dialogue on a rarely discussed issue.
Drawing on insights revealing low awareness of TFGBV, limited vocabulary, and poor knowledge of where to seek help, the campaign set out to unpack forms of TFGBV, normalise conversation, and guide people to trusted helpline resources.
Using entertainment-education techniques such as RJ-led talk segments, teaser reels, and on-the-street vox pops, messages on digital safety and help-seeking were woven into popular radio formats. Content was cross-promoted through Girl Effect's youth brand, Chhaa Jaa, which simultaneously ran the social media campaign "Online Ka Asar Real Hai Yaar" (Online harassment has real-world consequences). This parallel effort extended reach by continuing the conversation online, sharing helpline information, and offering a space for young people to learn more about TFGBV and how to seek support.
RJs who had faced online harm shared their experiences, giving authenticity to helpline mentions and guidance on reporting abuse. By pairing radio's reach and emotional closeness with a strong social-media presence, the campaign is raising salience, fostering empathy, and showing how layered SBCC strategies can move audiences from awareness to action and connect them to formal support systems.

El modelo de cambio cultural y comportamental es un conjunto de metodologías y de herramientas diseñadas para acercar las ciencias del comportamiento a comunidades de base, colectivos de jóvenes y empresas en regiones de Colombia. 
En el marco de Generando Equidad de USAID, Estudio Plural dio un giro a la forma en que suelen aplicarse las ciencias del cambio comportamental en Latinoamérica: en lugar de intervenciones expertas y fórmulas top-down, combinó el modelo COM-B con el modelo socioecológico feminista (Heise,1998) , integrando los enfoques transformador de género, interseccional y territorial. El objetivo fue ampliar el acceso, uso y aprovechamiento de estas herramientas por parte de organizaciones y entidades para impulsar la co-creación, y posteriormente el diseño autónomo de acciones dirigidas a transformar normas, narrativas y comportamientos cotidianos que reproducen las VBG. 
El modelo CCC es una apuesta por localizar las ciencias del comportamiento mediante un enfoque socioecológico. A través de juegos, relatos contextualizados, metodologías teatrales y espacios de confianza y co-creación, lideresas y comunidades indígenas y afrocolombianas, colectivos de jóvenes, instituciones públicas y empresas locales aprendieron a focalizar comportamientos específicos, comprender los factores individuales, interpersonales, comunitarios y colectivos que reproducen las VBG y a co-diseñar 27 acciones de cambio cultural y comportamental (como juegos, ollas comunitarias, narrativas audiovisuales, campañas de comunicación para el cambio y escuelas de masculinidades negras) para prevenir las violencias basadas en género en regiones urbanas y rurales de Colombia, entre ellas Montes de María, el Bajo Cauca y el Pacífico.