Poverty reduced
Globally, people living in poverty are more likely to live in locations with more conflict, fewer support services and weaker legal systems. Poverty also increases risk factors for intimate partner violence, like ill-health, reduced educational opportunities and increased household stress. At the same time, violence increases women’s risk of poverty due to both the direct costs of violence, such as out-of-pocket health expenses, as well as indirect costs like reduced earnings and productivity.
The objective of this strategy is to alleviate poverty through interventions targeted at women or the household, such as cash transfers, savings, microfinance loans and labour force interventions.By increasing economic security, such interventions may offer promising and cost-effective solutions to address violence against women, even when they do not target women specifically or have an explicit focus on preventing violence.
Types of interventions
Three types of poverty alleviation interventions featured in the RESPECT framework include:
1.Economic transfers such as conditional and unconditional cash transfer vouchers and in-kind transfers. The recipients of these transfers are either the head or a woman in the household depending on the setting.
2.Labour force interventions which focus on supporting a person or household to develop economic assets through increased employment, and opportunities for income generation (including livelihood training, productive asset transfers and cash for work). These interventions also include social protection programming for labour markets.
3. Microfinance or savings interventions which focus on supporting a person or household to develop their own economic assets through savings and loans. This includes microcredit, microsavings and individual or group savings and loans associations. This excludes those interventions that combine microfinance with social empowerment activities that are reflected in the Empowerment of women RESPECT strategy.
evidence
See pages 4-5 of the P strategy summary brief for evidence for interventions under this strategy.
