Overcoming SGBV in Eastern DRC

Sexual and gender-based violence, or SGBV, remains a significant and endemic problem in the DRC and is exacerbated by the ongoing conflict in the central and eastern regions of the country. The Ushindi program, which means “to overcome” in Swahili, was a $20 million U.S. Agency for International Development cooperative agreement to implement comprehensive approaches to SGBV, in eastern DRC. The project worked in 10 health zones and 108 health areas with a target population of 1,592,198.

In short, some of Ushindi’s greatest achievements were:

Sustainability

IMA’s strategy to work through the health zone structure and with local NGOs has enhanced sustainability for Ushindi’s activities;

Increased legal prosecution

The organization of mobile legal clinics has permitted the expansion and impact of legal prosecution;

Far-reaching behavior change communications activities

Ushindi’s BCC campaigns reinforced the protection of maternal and child rights by dramatically increasing in marriage and birth registrations;

Cutting edge methods of therapy for survivors

The addition of mobile strategies for group Cognitive Processing Therapy has been shown to be feasible;

Leading the Way in the flight against sgbv

USAID reports showed the Ushindi program reached about four times as many survivors as projects with similar funding levels and timeframes. As a result, Ushindi received an 18-month extension in the fiscal year 2016 to conduct in-depth research on the project’s implementation model and to develop a readily accessible package for USAID to implement high-quality SGBV interventions in new areas. Through this extension phase, IMA piloted this new package, including cognitive processing therapy-based psychotherapy, in three new health zones to present evidence of efficacy and cost and other practical considerations for scale-up.