A non-traditional approach for responding to gender-based violence disclosures

Gender-based violence (GBV) is one of the most prevalent forms of violence during times of conflict and crisis. This violence is destructive to communities and can lead to increased rates of homicide, suicide, lifelong disability, mental illness, substance abuse, poverty, and social exclusion. Ranked as experiencing the fourth most neglected displacement crisis in the world by the Norwegian Refugee Council, South Sudan continues to struggle with the impact of years of war. 

We’ve been working on adapting a GBV Pocket Guide into a low-literacy, visual guide for non-GBV trained humanitarian practitioners in South Sudan. With the adapted visual guide, any humanitarian practitioner, such as a non-food item distributor or a nutritionist, will be able to respond to GBV disclosures without any formal training or literacy skills.

In Bentiu, South Sudan we tested the visual pocket guide and gathered feedback from community members, in-country GBV specialists, and local humanitarian workers. In the field, we worked alongside the inspiring teams from CARE South Sudan and Women Vision, who helped to ensure that our work was aligned with community needs.

At Be the Change Group, we live and breathe this type of project, focusing on creating human-centred solutions and listening to the communities we serve. Being able to work alongside the community in Bentiu, and support them in building the capacity of the humanitarian response system was an incredibly rewarding experience.

We’re honoured to have the opportunity to support gender-based violence survivors while working with CARE International. And we’re not done yet. We’ll continue to improve the pocket guide so that GBV survivors in South Sudan are seen, heard, and supported.

Dive deeper into the story

• Developing the GBV Visual Pocket Guide – Get an in-depth look into the process of creating the low- to no-literacy, visual GBV pocket guide, including the background of the project, our strategy and solutions, and the approach we took to developing the visuals.
• Feedback from the field: Honduras and Mali – Explore how we adapted the low-literacy, visual GBV pocket guide based in South Sudan for the countries of Honduras and Mali.