Reducing Social Acceptance of Violence Against Women

Participants in the Oxfam-IPAP learning workshop. Credit: Nidhi Bhardwaj/Oxfam

Oxfam India, DFID-IPAP (International Partnership Agreement Programme) partners' National Learning Workshop held at New Delhi between December 21-23 presented a unique opportunity to all the participants to learn from each other's experiences- both achievements and challenges. The three-day workshop brought together epresentatives from twenty IPAP partner organisations from five states along with people from institutions like Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), Women Power Connect (WPC), Anhad,, Voluntary Service Overseas (VSO), and National Conference of Dalit Organisations (NACDOR). While the IPAP Violence Against Women Programme is nearing one year of its implementation, the participants used this workshop for experience-sharing as well as capacity building exercises were organised for them.

The workshop was inaugurated by Director, Policy and Advoacy, Oxfam India, Moutushi Sengupta. "The IPAP programme is very important to Oxfam. We expect this programme to help us achieve a key organizational objective- that of reducing social acceptance of violence against women. Through the IPAP programme, Oxfam aims to build upon the experience of past decades of work on ending violence against women undertaken by Oxfam and its partners in different part of the country."

The sessions of the workshop focussed around the issues of Support Institutions, Policy Advocacy, Community Mobilisation and on building common understanding on Gender and Social Exclusion. Founder and Director, Unnati, Binoy Acharya speaking as the key speaker in the session on gender and social exclusion engaged participants in a set of group exercises to deconstruct the concept of social exclusion and collaboratively analysed programmatic tools and strategies to strengthen the current efforts.  

In order to reinforce a clearer understanding of different aspects of social exclusions there were sessions like, Muslim Women and Social Exclusion by Shabnam Hashmi of Anhad. , Gender and Disability by Vijaya and Poorva from Voluntary Services Overseas, and on Dalit Women's Leadership by Rajni Tilak from NACDOR.

The national learning workshop also provided an opportunity to partners to showcase their work through movie snippets, photos and poster displays. Ar the conclusion of the workshop, participants felt enriched with shared experience, enhanced level of expertise to undertake action research and analysis and best practices to help build a stronger, more cohesive and programme on preventing violence against women.