Call summary :

Overview

Building on the success of its predecessor which showed that violence against women and girls (VAWG) is preventable, What Works II is a seven-year UK aid funded programme to test and scale up of evidence-based, practice-informed violence prevention approaches. Contributing towards the elimination of VAWG, What Works II seeks to achieve a measurable reduction in VAWG in development and humanitarian contexts, including for the most marginalised women and girls in all their diversities. The What Works II Programme seeks to expand the global knowledge and evidence base on what works to prevent VAWG and how to achieve this at scale through support for innovation, research and evaluation. It also aims to support women’s rights organisations (WROs) as essential actors in VAWG prevention ecosystem and improve access to funding to uphold the rights, agency and voices of women and girls in all their diversities. The What Works II Programme is delivered by joint consortia: Implementation Consortium and the Research Consortium.
The What Works II Programme has awarded scale and innovation grants in the first funding window and is now expanding the portfolio under the second funding window.

What is Prevention?
The What Works: Impact at Scale programme focuses on primary prevention of violence against women, girls in all their diversities. Primary prevention aims to stop violence before it starts. In public health, interventions are often categorised as primary, secondary or tertiary prevention. All three types of prevention are important, and often work in combination. Although What Works: Impact at Scale focuses on learning about and scaling primary prevention, we recognize that addressing violence is a continuum that occurs along the primary, secondary and tertiary prevention levels and support working across all levels. What Works aims to prevent violence through multiple pathways: by preventing violence before it occurs, particularly among children and youth, as well as preventing the re-occurrence of violence after it has started. We aim to prevent violence not only among those who participate in direct interventions such as couples or parenting programmes, but also to achieve a reduction in violence at a population level, by transforming community norms and practices around gender and violence.

Addressing VAWG (violence against women and girls) prevention in Climate Change.

Based on the recognition of the nexus between VAWG and climate change, the What Works II Programme will prioritize finding and funding grants that aim to prevent and reduce the risk of VAWG in climate change interventions.
The climate crisis is one of the greatest challenges of our time, threatening economic, environmental, and social security, particularly in the Global South, where these impacts are felt strongest. Women, girls, and gender-diverse people experience the impacts of climate change differently in terms of their safety and security, in part because climate change exacerbates the conditions that allow perpetrators to commit VAWG with impunity. Addressing VAWG through climate change projects is key to ensuring that deeply entrenched social norms that often perpetuate VAWG are addressed alongside climate change related risks to support whole communities to stay safe and resilient in the face of climate change, do no harm and leave no one behind.
We encourage applications with a focus on VAWG prevention in climate change contexts including but not limited to:
?Efforts to prevent VAWG against climate change activists and environmental human rights defenders (EHRDs), raising the alarm on climate change.
? Mainstreaming VAWG prevention into projects supporting a Just Transition1 to a low carbon economy, such as climate-friendly infrastructure and agriculture projects.
? Mainstreaming VAWG prevention into climate adaptation and resilience programmes such as reforestation efforts and livelihoods programmes.
? Mainstreaming VAWG prevention into climate change-induced disaster preparedness and response, including through anticipatory action.
Based on the disability commitments made at the start of the What Works II Programme, we will continue to pursue the commitment to supporting the leadership of women with disability-led organisations through the innovation grants that will be awarded in Window 2, with priority given to these organisations submitting proposals on the above thematic areas.
Successful applicants will be invited to collaborate with the What Works II technical advisors and a team of researchers in ‘learning partnerships’ to co-design a full proposal that refines the project’s Theory of Change, the research questions that the project aims to answer, and the activities and scope of the intervention. This will be an interactive process of adaptation to ensu