Citation

Peterman A, Palermo TM, Ferrari G. BMJ Glob. Health 2018; 3(6): e001143.

Affiliation

Centre for Academic Primary Care, Bristol Medical School, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2018, BMJ Publishing Group)

DOI

10.1136/bmjgh-2018-001143

PMID

30588347

PMCID

PMC6278915

Abstract

Economic strengthening interventions are proposed to reduce interpersonal violence, including intimate partner violence (IPV) and violence against children (VAC) in low-income and middle-income countries (LMICs). This proposition is intuitive, as economic or poverty status and violence are typically correlated. However, economic interventions are not uniform. Programmes such as social safety nets (eg, cash or in-kind transfers); livelihood, employment or entrepreneurship programmes; microcredit and savings or broader economic policy instruments (eg, tax credits or fiscal subsidies) induce diverse behavioural changes leading to a variety of outcomes by nature of their different designs and target populations. Further, impacts on violence and its predictors may vary by context according to the levels of generalised poverty and cultural or gender norms. Given the global scale of violence, it is imperative to identify effective prevention strategies through rigorous testing in multiple contexts building a reliable evidence base, before recommending scale-up for violence reduction.

One type of economic intervention, microfinance institutions (MFIs), including microcredit, micro-savings and individual or group village savings and loan associations (VSLAs), have been highlighted as promising interventions for reducing VAC/IPV by INSPIRE, a multinational partnership launched in July 2016. The INSPIRE package is led by the WHO in collaboration with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), End Violence Against Children: The Global Partnership, the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), Together for Girls, UNICEF, United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the World Bank. Each letter of the word ‘INSPIRE’ stands for one of the seven evidence-based strategies including: (1) Implementation and enforcement of laws, (2) Norms and values, (3) Safe environments, (4) Parent and caregiver support, (5) Income and economic strengthening, (6) Response and support services and (7) Education and life skills. INSPIRE promotes two types of bundled MFI programmes (‘MFI-plus’) among its income and economic strengthening strategies for reducing VAC: group savings and loans combined with gender-equity training and microfinance combined with gender-norms training.5 Thus, the INSPIRE strategy implies that (1) mechanisms for impact are driven by the economic or poverty channel (rather than norms or values channel, or by MFI simply being a platform for reaching women in organised groups) and (2) MFIs reduce poverty (and subsequently VAC/IPV), thereby recommending countries should ‘adapt and adopt’ similar strategies ...

Language: en

Keywords

Intimate partner violence; micro-finance institutions; prevention