The Cash Transfer & Intimate Partner Violence Research Collaborative: Expertise, impact, and future directions

Violence against women and girls (VAWG) has severe long-term consequences for women’s health and well-being, imposes significant economic costs through lost productivity, and has intergenerational impacts on children. Although evidence exists on effective approaches to reduce VAWG, many interventions are resource-intensive and difficult to scale. Stakeholders increasingly recognize that accelerated progress requires embedding VAWG prevention and response approaches within diverse sectors, including in existing systems and large-scale sectoral programming. Sectors focused on reducing poverty and economic insecurity offer a particularly high-potential but underleveraged opportunity. Despite their extensive reach and influence over the structural drivers of VAWG, these sectors have not traditionally focused on VAWG reduction. The field lacks actionable evidence on how to leverage these large-scale systems to reduce VAWG in ways that governments and other key actors can adopt, finance, and sustain, including approaches that reach women and girls in fragile and climate-vulnerable settings.