In 2024 we began to implement a new project, Collaborative Evidence Building for Impact at Scale: From local to global, supported by Co-Impact. The project will continue until August 2026 and leverages SVRI’s experience in building evidence for programming at the country level.

The project is being implemented in Sri Lanka, where SVRI piloted a new method of grant making. In a departure from our customary open calls for proposals, we worked alongside a multi-sectoral local consortium to co-develop the research focus area and related proposal. The proposal was approved in July 2024. A national team including government stakeholders and SVRI will design, implement, analyse, and disseminate research to initiate an evidence-based implementation of approaches that work to prevent violence against women (VAW) and unpack scale processes, and implementation learnings that are suitable to their context and project needs. Through an approach that models feminist grant making, supportive and equitable partnerships, and extensive capacity strengthening we hope to synthesize practice and research-based learnings about how to build and share evidence on effective approaches to scale violence prevention programming with country level stakeholders and partners.

Inception Phase: Year One – 2023

As part of the inception phase of this project explored new approaches that will inform our future work. Four key aspects of this were:

1. Strengthening feminist grant making: ‘How do we ensure a truly feminist approach to grant making in our own grant making efforts?’ This involved exploring and documenting how to strengthen and improve the grant making process for the SVRI team, the reviewers, and applicants for the SVRI grant with specific attention to application and selection processes. Click here to read more about our findings and process.
2. Exploring a feminist monitoring, evaluation, and learning (MEL) framework: We are exploring how to use a feminist MEL framework to measure change and impact at community, organisational and systemic levels. The developed framework will inform our general SVRI grant making programme and act as a base for the Co-Impact Consortium who will define their country-level project-specific MEL framework, guided by their own theory of change, outcomes, change pathways, resources, and data collection methods that make sense for their focus and setting.
3. Comprehensive Capacity Strengthening Strategy: We have developed a detailed strategy that envisages wraparound bespoke capacity strengthening and support through various engagements, activities, and resources with multi-sectoral grantee teams. We hope to facilitate the development of a cohort of excellence in violence prevention and intervention adaptation that will be nurtured to grow into a country-level network that will support ongoing exchange and collaboration in building priority evidence and influencing policy and practice.
4. Learning from equitable, localised consortium building: We developed a learning agenda that examines how the implementation of ethical and equitable consortium building and co-production of a research proposal can contribute to supporting evidence-building for scaling evidence-based, innovative primary prevention initiatives in a selected country.

Proposal and Implementation: Year Two – 2024

In 2024, project activities focused on co-creating a comprehensive proposal for the project and laying the groundwork for a pilot study aimed at integrating intimate partner violence prevention into the existing Pre-Conception Care Package (PCCP). This package is delivered by public health midwives to newly married couples as part of a program run by the Family Health Bureau (FHB) under the Sri Lankan Ministry of Health.

Key activities during this time have included:

• Developing and initiating a capacity strengthening plan focused on primary prevention research and intervention adaptation and implementation.
• Conducting a four-day planning and capacity exchange meeting in Colombo to refine strategies and align partner roles.
• Supporting national partners’ participation in global learning spaces, including the SVRI Forum 2024, for knowledge sharing and networking.
• Developing and submitting a detailed ethics proposal for formative research, though approval delays have impacted research timelines.
• Reviewing existing primary prevention interventions, including curricula, to identify promising models that are contextually relevant and adaptable to the Sri Lankan healthcare system context.
• Conducting multiday training workshop in Cape Town on adaptation and monitoring of programmes.
• Applying an adaptation framework tool to systematically assess multiple interventions based on specific criteria, narrowing the selection to a shortlist of two.