Improving the quality of sexual and gender-based violence services for Haitian women and girls

Sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) against girls and women is a serious health and human rights concern in Haiti. Most women who suffer from this type of violence are among the most underserved and at-risk members of society. This means they lack access to essential supports and services, including avenues to seek justice. Accessing the range of necessary services is challenged by limited resources, economic insecurity, prevalent social norms and gender power imbalances, as well as a lack of political will.

This project will work with communities, government and civil society organizations to provide integrated and improved services (health, social and legal) to victims of SGBV. The project will have a specific focus on adolescent girls because they are particularly vulnerable to SGBV.

Building on lessons from three years of implementing an integrated multisectoral intervention to address SGBV in the Central Plateau and Lower Artibonite departments in Haiti (see previous project page link below for further details). This project aims to: (1) document the prevalence of SGBV through high-quality data that will be made available for decision-makers. (2) It focuses on improving the timeliness, quality and accessibility of multisectoral SGBV supports by examining both supply-side (providers) and demand-side (users) perspectives on the quality of services. (3) Finally, the project will assess the validity and effectiveness of multi-sectoral approaches to addressing SGBV. Gender and costing analyses are integrated across these objectives to enrich the utility and replicability of the findings.

Implemented with the collaboration of Zanmi Lasante, or Partners in Health, a Haitian non-governmental organization providing health services to the poor, this project will work alongside the community, government representatives, Haitian academic and civil society to make concrete contributions to theory and practice on how to design and evaluate a multi-pronged and multi-sectoral SGBV intervention in Haiti. Capacity strengthening activities include targeted training, as well as support to Haitian-based graduate students embarking on studies related to this project. The project will work in close collaboration with another IDRC-supported project that focuses on strengthening the enabling environment for feminist research, gender studies and addressing issues of women’s rights in Haiti.