ActionAid shortlisted for Dochás Innovation Award

ActionAid Ireland was delighted that their Women’s Rights Programme was shortlisted for the Dóchas Innovation Award at the Dóchas Awards ceremony that took place on 5 December 2018.

Our Women’s Rights Programme (WRP), funded by Irish Aid, is being implemented in Ethiopia, Kenya and Nepal with a public engagement component in Ireland, and has been running since January 2017. We have adopted a new Behaviour Change (BC) approach to tackle the root causes of gender based violence (GBV) after an evaluation of the previous WRP programme highlighted that we could do more to tackle the root causes of GBV in a deeper way.

We are currently doing this by analysing human behaviour and determining how this needs to change. The BC approach has enabled us to better understand the capabilities, opportunities and motivations that are driving behaviour that keep women in poverty and facing violence by doing a deeper analysis and designing specific interventions that help to shift behaviours in the direction we want: to create safer communities for women and girls and more economic opportunities for women.

We partner with University College London’s Centre for Behaviour Change to avail of their training and expertise in understanding and implementing the BC methodology, as they developed the Behaviour Change Wheel after analysis of several BC frameworks which led them to design this holistic approach.

Listen to RTÉ Drivetime interview about this innovation – 13 minutes in (October 2018)

Our CEO, Siobhán McGee, recently visited the Women’s Rights Programme in Kenya, click here to read about her visit.