Webinar: 16 Days of Activism: What Men Should do to End Violence Against Women & Girls

The 16 Days of Activism against Gender-Based Violence is an annual international campaign that kicks off on 25 November (the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women) and runs until 10 December (Human Rights Day). It was started by activists at the inaugural Women’s Global Leadership Institute in 1991 and is used as an organizing strategy by individuals and organizations around the world to call for the prevention and elimination of violence against women and girls. The theme for this year’s celebration is World: Fund, Respond, Prevent, Collect!”

“What men should do” is a campaign that Grassroots Strategies Africa has taken in order to engage men to fund, respond, prevent and collect evidence on sexual and gender-based violence. Fighting gender-based violence has been on the national and international agenda for decades, and yet still one in three women will report experiencing violence in their lifetime. All over the world, violence against women and girls has risen due to lockdown measures put in place to combat the COVID-19 pandemic. “Orange the Building women’s agency, autonomy and many other empowerment programs have been implemented but in somewhat way, violence against women and girls still, is at its highest peak. Evidently, women’s empowerment has been one way to combat violence. Through getting rid of rigid stereotypes of gender roles which are concretized by defining individuals in terms of sex, the focus on women only has had its critics and backlash especially from men.

Over the recent years, male engagement has taken a different positive angle to combat the violence through promoting positive masculinity, by getting the silent majority of men, who do not agree with harmful practices and attitudes. Violence occurs in a society that condones and encourages it. To combat individual and systemic forms of violence against women and girls, and for societies to achieve their economic, social and development goals, it is critical to engage every member of the community, especially men, as active participants and promoters of change to the status quo.

It is with this background that Grassroots Strategies Africa intends to host a webinar with male gender equality experts, with a purpose of examining the role of men in addressing and ending gender-based violence. Specifically, the webinar intends to: