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With the support of the UN Trust Fund, Gender Links in partnership with the Network on Violence Against Women that coordinates the GBV cluster in the Alliance will hold an evaluative meeting of national action plans to end gender-based violence from 15-17 February. The meeting will be followed by a meeting to formalise the working of the cluster. It also takes place against the backdrop of the UN Secretary General’s UNite campaign.
The meeting will create a roadmap for future plans and bring together government representatives and national lead NGOs around the topic of gender-based violence.
The meeting will take place following a technical expert group meeting on costing implementation of the SADC Protocol at which a regional costing methodology and regional action plan will be developed.
This concept will then be presented to representatives of government. They will submit their inputs before attending an evaluative meeting on action plans to end gender violence. The aim is to get the costing methodology to SADC Heads of State at their annual Summit in August 2011.
This meeting comes at an opportune time for benchmarking progress in all SADC countries around implementation of action plans to end gender-based violence.
This in line with the 2006 UN Secretary General’s call for all member states to adopt and implement multi-sector action plans to address violence against women. Later, in 2008, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon launched the UNiTE to End Violence against Women campaign which reiterates the need for a multi-sector approach to ending gender-based violence. The campaign was launched in Southern Africa and Indian Oceanic Islands in May 2010.
One of the UNiTE campaign’s priorities would see all countries adopt and implement multi-sectoral national action plans by 2015. This is in line with the SADC Protocol’s target to halve current levels of gender-based violence by 2015. With only four years to meet these targets there is no comprehensive data to gauge how progress will be measured.
It is for this reason such meetings are important and the event will also be used to share findings of the Gauteng GBV Indicators pilot project, which seeks to test indicators that can be used to measure gender-based violence in a comprehensive manner.
The indicators provide a baseline measurement of extent, response, support and prevention of gender violence in Gauteng using a household survey, administrative and qualitative data analyses.
The GBV indicators have been tested in the Gauteng province of South Africa and have the potential to be cascaded to all SADC countries. The pilot study is currently being rolled out in Botswana and Mauritius in partnership with the respective Women’s Affairs Department/Ministry. If rolled out in all countries it will provide baseline information allowing for follow-up studies in 2014 to see if the levels have gone down by 50% in time for the 2015 deadline.
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