Violence against women and girls (VAWG) is one of the most common human rights violations in Zimbabwe.
Intimate partner violence (IPV) is the most common forms of gender-based violence (GBV) in Zimbabwe. The 2019 Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey (MICS) shows that 49% of married women between the ages of 15 and 49 across the country have experienced physical or sexual violence from a spouse and 28% of these have experienced physical injury as a result of this violence. Zimbabwe is also one of the world’s 44 hot spots of early marriage: The 2019 MICS found that one in three Zimbabwean women reported having been married before the age of 18.
A multitude of social, political and economic factors contribute to the elevated threat of violence against women and girls including social beliefs and norms about the roles of men, women, girls and boys, the normalisation of violence, the protracted economic and food crisis, weak enforcement of legal protections and gaps in services needed to respond effectively to violence.
To address this, the UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) has funded the five-year Stopping Abuse and Female Exploitation (SAFE) programme. SAFE aims to protect women and girls in Zimbabwe from the most severe forms of GBV, particularly IPV, in the districts of Chiredzi, Chikomba and Mwenezi.
Tetra Tech International Development is leading the SAFE Evaluation and Learning Unit (ELU), a key component of the programme that works alongside SAFE Communities, the implementation consortium, to strengthen the evidence on what works to prevent and respond to GBV.
The aim of the ELU is to:
- Test the effectiveness and impact of the SAFE programme;
- Inform its adaption;
- Optimise its delivery to maximise the impact of interventions; and
- Help to explain what works, why and how, and use this learning to contribute to the national and global evidence base on preventing GBV.
Through the ELU, we support learning for adaptation, evaluate the impact of SAFE and provide recommendations on scaling up the intervention if found to be effective and impactful. This is achieved by conducting baseline study as well as a summative evaluation. We have also undertaken a series of qualitative deep dive research studies over the life of the programme. Two of these studies are longitudinal and track SAFE participants over time through qualitative methods to measure the effectiveness of SAFE, its impact on IPV and other outcomes outlined in the programme’s theory of change.
The SAFE ELU services have been extended from April 2024 to March 2025 with the aim of demonstrating a strong evidence base that will support the sustainability of the SAFE approach by a successor donor in Zimbabwe and further uptake of lessons by key stakeholders in Zimbabwe and the wider GBV research community. As part of this extension, the ELU will:
- Conduct a quantitative endline study to quantitatively assess change as per the programme’s theory of change; and
- Ensure effective dissemination and uptake of research and evaluation findings to drive programme learning and delivery.
Through the endline study, we will assess change in the prevalence of IPV among SAFE beneficiaries and associated attitudes and behaviours by tracking and surveying the same participants sampled at baseline.
Zimbabwe
2020-2025
Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, UK
Learning products
Our team’s learning products measure the effectiveness of the SAFE programme while informing its ongoing delivery and adaptation. The most recent resources can be found below.
This policy and programme brief presents key findings and recommendations from the baseline evaluation of SAFE, conducted by the Evaluation and Learning Unit. The brief is targeted towards researchers, practitioners, government stakeholders, policy makers and donors working on the prevention of VAWG in Zimbabwe.
Deep Dive 1 focused on the social and gender norms that drive – and may also prevent – the perpetration of GBV in SAFE intervention districts and employed two core study methods:
- In-depth interviews with community members, with the sample disaggregated by gender (women and men) and age (18-24, and 25+), and a sample of IDIs with women living with HIV/AIDS; and
- Key informant interviews with local community leaders, members of NGOs and local government.
A vignette approach was used to gather information from participants using a fictional story about a couple and asked them their views and perceptions about a series of hypothetical situations. These views were framed around how typical the fictional story and complementing scenarios were in participants’ own communities. Interviews explored perceptions within target communities about the perpetration of GBV, including IPV and early marriage.
This learning brief summarises the key findings and recommendations from the study.
This research brief presents key findings from the quantitative and qualitative baseline evaluation carried out in three districts across Zimbabwe: Chiredzi, Chikomba and Mwenezi.
Targeted towards researchers and practitioners working on the prevention of gender-based violence in Zimbabwe, the brief gives insights into the factors that drive intimate partner conflict and violence.
This practice brief outlines six lessons our team on the SAFE Evaluation and Learing Unit identified following a qualitative study on reducing household economic stress through Internal Savings and Lending groups (ISALs).
These lessons play a key role in strengthening the evidence base on what works to prevent and respond to violence against women and girls in Zimbabwe, and could also be of benefit to other practitioners working with ISALs.
This poster outlines key evidence and lessons from the Evaluation and Learning Unit (ELU) on the SAFE programme. It illustrates how an ELU can support learning, adaptation and evaluation of violence prevention interventions through six SAFE ELU studies.
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