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In Malawi, nearly half of all girls are married before their eighteenth birthday — child marriage rates are among the highest in the world. Spotlight Initiative in Malawi recognised that schools alone could not solve this problem, but identified them as a key stakeholder in prevention and response.  The programme was designed to be deliberately multi-layered. The Safe Schools intervention reached over 212,000 adolescent learners, teaching them how to detect and report sexual and gender-based violence and harmful practices. This led to the identification of 941 cases of child marriage with…

The Safe Space Mentorship Programme (SSMP) in Malawi supports gender equitable social norms, attitudes and behavioural change at community and individual levels. Supporting girls and young women from 10 to 24 years old, SSMP is a weekly programme that runs for 6 months addressing gender perspectives, sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR), gender-based violence (GBV), harmful practices, referral pathways, and life skills from a rights-based perspective. Its purpose is to empower young women and girls to recognise that violence is illegal, how it violates their basic human rights, and…

In preparation for Spotlight Initiative programming in Malawi, an evidence review was commissioned in 2020 to inform preparatory activities and enable evidence-based refinement of programme interventions and strategies across the whole programme, as well as identify knowledge gaps to set the research agenda. This research critically reviewed and synthesised peer-reviewed and grey literature on Sexual and Gender Based Violence (SGBV), Harmful Practices (HP) and Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights (SRHR) in Malawi, including their causes and drivers. Some of the intrinsic motivations…