Getting to 0% Gender Based Violence in South Africa

Project Directors: Helen Underhill
Amount: £2.5K
Funder: Research Development Fund (internal)
Duration: January 2019 - June 2019

This work explores how members of a low-income, rural community near Johannesburg have been able to reduce gender-based violence (GBV) through a gender action-learning model that has shifted social norms. Referred to as Letsema, the emergent learning process brings together community members, either as residents, facilitators or coaches. Along with the South African partners from the Labour Research Service and Gender at Work, community members will reflect on Letsema to explore a question that the community has of their own practice: what it would take for more communities to work collaboratively to reduce GBV?

The research will take place in South Africa, within the community, in March 2019. It centres on workshop activities over four days with Letsema members, coaches and local partners. Holding the workshops within the community itself will ensure an open space for community members to reflect on how the action group model facilitates learning that can expose and challenge social norms that contribute to GBV. This includes identifying the challenges and barriers that limit the model’s success and identifying research questions and approaches that can establish how to work with actors with whom there may be disagreement or conflict. As well as theorising the emergent learning process through deploying a pedagogical framework of conflict, we will consider how Letsema’s action group learning model for reducing GBV can be sustained and scaled-up through collaborations with NGOs and Social Movements in South Africa.