While there are many inspiring examples of individuals, organisations and collectives doing violence prevention differently, most technical assistance and partnership models remain top-down, with programmes developed, evaluated and funded by the ‘Global North’ or those in the global minority. Moreover, despite best intentions and growing calls for equity and accountability, most funders, practitioners, and researchers still find themselves navigating partnerships shaped by entrenched power imbalances. What is needed to create widespread, transformational change? What can funders, practitioners and researchers do to best support grassroots movements and foster more equitable collaborations?

In 2021, global nonprofit Womanity commissioned a study on partnership models for advancing adaptation and scale of violence prevention programmes. In October 2024, after nearly three years of collaborative research, Womanity and the Center on Gender Equity and Health at the University of California San Diego (UCSD) presented the findings of this study at the SVRI Forum in Cape Town during a panel discussion called “Feminist scale: shifting power through equity-centred action”.

Anne Gathumbe from What Works to Prevent VAWG and the International Rescue Committee, Eveline Nair Tavares from Associação Cabo-Verdiana de Luta Contra a Violencia Baseada no Género, and Dr. Vandana Sharma from the Equality Insights Lab and Harvard T.H.Chan School of Public Health, were invited to reflect on how these findings resonated with their experiences as funder, practitioner and researcher, respectively. These panellists were later joined by Ramadhan Kirunda (Impact and Innovations Development Centre), Anjalee Kohli (Independent Consultant), and Tina Musuya (Social Development Direct) to facilitate small group discussions with a diverse group of participants on what works to foster ‘power within, power with, and power to’ when cultivating more equitable partnerships, and to brainstorm solutions for overcoming challenges. This is what we found:

Exploring our intersectional identities and ‘power within’

We invited participants to form small groups and discuss how the study findings and panellists’ experiences resonated with their own work.

Both practitioners and researchers agreed that building equitable partnerships requires deliberate and ongoing effort, time, and resources. They also acknowledged that donor requirements and funding structures continue to restrict the extent to which they are able to engage in truly equitable partnerships. Despite this, a few key elements resonated for working towards more balanced collaborations:

• Shared values and principles: These create a foundation of trust, enabling partners to better understand each other’s perspectives and motivations. It is essential to create space to discuss these values throughout the project lifespan.
• Mutual learning: Each partner brings unique strengths with insights to offer and lessons to learn. It is important to recognise each partner’s distinct value and to support mutual learning and knowledge sharing.
• Acknowledging and discussing power and positionality: Power imbalances require ongoing, intentional effort to shift. Partners must practice reflexivity and prioritise building trust-based relationships — essential foundations for open dialogue and actively advancing transformational change.

Many funders are aware that their standards play a significant role in shaping power dynamics. Here are some of those reflections:

• Building trust: It is critical to build trust and close relationships if funders want to engage in truly equitable partnerships. However, striking the right balance can be challenging — remaining close enough to understand partners’ needs but not so close as to be seen as controlling. Rebuilding trust, especially when it has been shaped by past experiences, can be difficult. In-person meetings are a valuable way to strengthen relationships and foster deeper trust.
• Understanding each partner’s values and contributions: It is critical to clarify and appreciate what each partner brings to the table beyond financial support – contributions such as values, knowledge, lived experience, and relationships with key local stakeholders in the communities where the programme is being implemented. These are just as vital as funding to the success of the work.

Understanding what works for cultivating ‘power with’ partners

Participants were asked to share what works for them in building more power-balanced partnerships. Here are some of the actions they have found effective:

• Co-designing project implementation strategies, plans, processes and frameworks from ideation to implementation: This fosters a sense of ownership, trust and understanding for all partners and promotes horizontality.
• Ensuring continuous and consistent communication while respecting different styles: Effective communication is at the heart of any strong partnership. Understanding each partner’s communication style — and finding creative ways to accommodate these differences — helps ensure information remains open and unhindered.
• Creating space for feedback and difficult conversations: Effective feedback mechanisms foster open communication, strengthen trust, and help partners clarify expectations. It is essential to offer encouragement and identify opportunities for improvement. Feedback is most valuable when it is constructive and actionable.
• Unpacking assumptions: Openness and humility allow partners to better understand one another and prevent friction and erosion of trust. Keeping this openness alive through regular communication helps surface challenges early and creates the opportunity to adapt where needed, all of which supports the partnership’s ongoing evolution.

Reflecting on challenges and solutions for sustaining the ‘power to’ take collective action and accountability

Finally, researchers and practitioners reflected on the ongoing challenges they face in this work. Here are some of the key challenges:

• Different (work) cultures and languages: Funders often operate in a world that is significantly different from those they aim to support. These differences can lead to resistance and misalignment between funder requirements and what partners actually need or expect.
• Improving internal culture and partnerships requires collective commitment and resources, but time and funding is often limited: Many funding opportunities lack adequate resources dedicated to improving internal culture and supporting truly equitable partnerships. Furthermore, after funds are disbursed, rushed work planning and top-down, reactive systems often make it difficult for project actors to build consensus around shared values and expectations, or to establish clear processes for giving and responding to actionable feedback.
• Despite best intentions, some power imbalances are difficult if not impossible to fully overcome: Partnerships are almost never truly ‘horizontal’, in part because imbalances in financial and decision-making power are continually reinforced. Power imbalances can also arise when partner organisations differ in size, maturity, values, knowledge, or areas of expertise. These persistent undercurrents, if left unaddressed, can make it difficult for partners to build trust and engage fully, openly, and honestly.

Other challenges and setbacks that funders shared during the session included:

• Accepting changes can be critical for success: As programmes are adapted and implemented, change is not only inevitable — it is often necessary. However, some funders find it difficult to accommodate changes—especially when those details are formalised in contracts. Yet, flexibility and responsiveness are often crucial to a programme’s overall success.
• Creating mutual accountability: More than holding partners accountable, it’s important to reflect on to whom accountability is owed. Funders, in particular, must recognise that everyone is accountable not only to themselves but also to the communities they serve.

We also invited participants to brainstorm solutions to these challenges. Here are some of their ideas:

• Developing clear partnership policies: Organisations should put in place partnership policies that articulate their core values, expectations, and guiding principles for collaboration.
• Focusing on building and maintaining trust: It’s important to be intentional about building trust in a partnership. As one of the participants aptly put it, “We are all humans, after all, and we work better with our friends!”
• Taking time to pause: Holding regular and facilitated ‘pause and reflect’ sessions throughout the project lifecycle is an excellent way to celebrate collective wins and share feedback for improving processes and ways of working together.
• Investing in improving internal culture: This requires advanced planning and long-term commitment. Conducting equity audits and creating safe spaces for collective reflection and action are powerful ways of building internal culture.
• Creating ongoing opportunities to build community: Sharing experiences and learnings from fellow researchers, practitioners, and funders will further strengthen collective action and accountability.

Pathways Forward

It is clear that funders, practitioners and researchers want to build equitable partnerships for VAWG prevention programmes. While some feel progress is being made, others believe that significant challenges remain. The more traditional the funding model, the harder it is to move away from hierarchical approaches. Even when partners adopt more equitable models, it is still critical to prioritise trust-building and create spaces for open and honest communication, and self-reflection.

A core pillar of equitable partnerships is the recognition that all partners bring value and resources to the work. In a capitalist society, funding is often viewed as the most important resource. However, lived-experience, local knowledge, cultural understanding, and relationships with key community actors are equally important for the success and lasting impact of adapted and scaled interventions.

Finally, our experience at the SVRI Forum underscored the importance of creating spaces where people with diverse perspectives and positionalities feel safe to share their knowledge, experiences, challenges, and recommendations.

As we continue this collective journey of learning and sharing, we invite you to consider the following reflective questions – in your organisations, in your partnerships, or simply for yourself:

1. Based on your experience, what are the main gaps in knowledge or practice that could support feminist scale and equity-centred partnerships?
2. What is one action that you could take as a funder, practitioner, activist, or researcher to address these gaps?
3. How might you gently hold yourself accountable to that action?

These questions are not just rhetorical – they are an invitation to bring reflection into your daily practice and to shape future conversations, strategies and collaborations. We’d love to hear what emerges if you feel like sharing. Drop us a note on info@womanity.org.

Resources

Explore the full research report and  download the session’s presentation.

Other relevant resources related to adaptation of VAWG programmes:

• Planning Pause & Reflect Sessions-Practical Guidance for Your Project
• The IPV ADAPT+ Framework
• Adapting SASA!: Tips and Tools
• INSPIRE: Guide to Adaptation and Scale Up
• Prevention Collaborative: Adapting Curriculum Based Violence Prevention Programmes
• Prevention Collaborative: Introducing the Prevention Triad
• UN Women: Adaptive programming to prevent violence against women and girls 

About the authors

This blog was written by:

• Sarah Smith, MPH, Research Program Manager, Center on Gender Equity and Health at the University of California, San Diego
• Laura Somoggi, Co-CEO, Womanity
• Rebecka Lundgren, Co-Executive Director, Center on Gender Equity and Health at the University of California, San Diego
• Marilyn Akinola, Independent Consultant
• Carolyne Shemeri, Senior Programme Officer, Womanity