What We Do

Partners for Prevention has three components:

Communication for Social Change
Partners for Prevention enhances the knowledge and skills of local partners to engage in effective communications for social change. Our strategy is to thoroughly analyze both the substance and context of an issue before we begin to design communications. We do this through integrating research and evidence with capacity development and communications for more efficient, accurate and effective campaigning and advocacy initiatives that reach out to specifically targeted audiences in ways that can inspire real and lasting change. P4P offers strategic support for planning long-term and comprehensive communications strategies, analytical support to help translate research results into effective communications and technical support for incorporating informed primary prevention action-oriented messages into initiatives ranging from mass media campaigns to local level face-to-face interactions. The programme is also promoting the use of new information technologies and popular national social networking channels in Asia to reach out to and connect with youth. Peers are very influential in all of our lives, and particularly for young people. Building upon the power of peer influence, social media campaigning allows for positive messages that support violence prevention to be discussed and shared among peers through their existing online networks.

Capacity Development and Networking
Partners for Prevention is fostering sub-regional consortiums of practitioners to undertake collective and coordinated capacity development initiatives in South Asia as well as Southeast and East Asia. As opposed to supporting ad hoc trainings, this strategy allows for consistency of approach, quality control of trainings and tools, and a sustainable pool of trainers from the different sub-regions.

Regional groups of practitioners in these two sub-regions are working to consolidate successful training approaches and materials and to contextualize them for their specific constituencies and needs. To put these regional curricula into practice, training of trainers and mentoring activities are deepening capacity for trainers, practitioners and key stakeholders to involve boys and men for more effective violence prevention. Regional group members are also learning through sub-regional and global exchanges to improve their approaches to the primary prevention of violence against women.

To enrich these processes and house a global database of resources, a web-based practitioners’ portal “Engagingmen.net” has been developed by Partners for Prevention to serve as a comprehensive networking and resource hub. Please see www.engagingmen.net

Partners for Prevention views volunteering as an important means of working at the community level. Thus, through the coordination of a network of local and UN Volunteers, the programme is promoting volunteerism while learning from selected pilot sites at the community level around the region.

Evidence-based Policy Advocacy
Partners for Prevention is coordinating a regional action-oriented research project that is consolidating a pioneering body of knowledge on masculinities and their connections to violence against women to inform evidence-based responses to violence prevention. The study is particularly significant because it employs quantitative, qualitative and political analysis methodologies in a diverse set of countries from South Asia, South East Asia, East Asia and the Pacific, to create a comprehensive and holistic picture of the root causes of violence against women in the region. This research will provide cross-country comparable data on violence against women from the perspective of men for the first time in the region, as well as prevalence data from women in areas where little data exists such as Papua New Guinea, Indonesia (Aceh) and China. A pooled data set from these countries with a sample of more than 20,000 men and women will provide unprecedented power for complex analysis on masculinities and violence in the region.

The research findings will be put into practice in P4P’s other programme components through a long-term communication strategy to ensure a significant contribution to violence prevention and social change.