Exchanging Knowledge: Learning from each other to end violence against refugee women and girls

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Over the past two years, the UN Trust Fund has invested in funding projects specifically focused on preventing and ending violence against refugee women and girls in the context of humanitarian crises. These organizations came together in September 2018 to share their knowledge, lessons learned, and shared challenges with other grantees working in similar contexts. The UN Trust Fund is committed to the exchange of knowledge and documenting lessons learned from the work of projects globally to inform current and future work on preventing and ending violence against women and girls. Participants from eight NGOs from the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, the State of Palestine and Serbia attended the 5-day workshop in Amman, Jordan.

This knowledge-exchange workshop facilitated grantees to exchange learning and to document lessons among organizations working on similar topics. During  the event grantees also received the Sphere training to help them address programmatic and operational gaps in capacity in humanitarian work. During the workshop, participants explored themes including; accountability to affected populations, needs assessments, response coordination, impartiality and non-discrimination, keeping populations safe from harm, and looking after oneself as a humanitarian worker.

The participants also discussed how to collect evidence of effective projects, shared challenges and exchanged best or promising practices with the other organizations.

During this event, a specialized training was conducted to improve the quality of humanitarian assistance and the accountability of humanitarian actors to their communities. Pre and post test scores showed that participants’ knowledge of the principles shared increased by 30% by the end of the training.

In the post-event evaluation, the participants reported that new knowledge was gained that could be applied in their own work. Key lessons and solutions were highlighted to document practices in a manner that can be shared, applied and tested further.

Watch this video to see how bringing together organizations working on similar topics can enrich this life-changing work to prevent and end violence against women and girls in humanitarian crises.