IMPACT EVALUATION OF ACTIONAID NIGERIA AND WOMEN AID COLLECTIVE COMMUNICATION STRATEGIES FOR MITIGATING VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN AND GIRLS

Violence against women and girls (VAWG) continues to rise irrespective of interventions by government and development organizations towards curbing the menace. This situation is attributed to Nigeria’s socio-cultural leaning which development and gender experts believe is patriarchal. The success or failure of VAWG interventions is dependent on the effectiveness of communication strategies employed by programmers. To ascertain this, the research evaluated the impact of the communication strategies used by ActionAid Nigeria and Women Aid Collective in communicating violence against women and girls’ programmes in the Federal Capital Territory and Enugu State respectively within a five-year period (2015 to 2019). The research was anchored on Feminist Communication and Behaviour Change Communication theories. Adopting a qualitative research methodology, secondary data were collated and analysed from extant literatures, while primary data were derived from interviews with forty respondents through purposive sampling from persons who are either working on or were affected by VAWG. Findings of the study revealed that that ActionAid Nigeria and Women Aid Collective employed mixed communication approaches to communicate their VAWG interventions. However, high impact change were not achieved. The study concludes that this affected programme outcomes, and therefore recommends that VAWG implementers should be more deliberate in planning communication from project design to implementation continuum if change in behavior of target audience is to be achieved.