Joining our Access Africa Programme is the Equal Community Foundation, whose vision is a world free from gender-based violence. ECF works towards this vision through its mission: to raise every boy in India to be gender equitable, an outcome it calls Gender Equitable Boys. Challenges is working with the ECF team to bring their experience and expertise to Rwanda.

Until recently, Equal Community Foundation had focused on designing and implementing programmes that transform knowledge, skills, attitudes and behaviours for adolescent boys in India, while rolling out that approach through a national collaboration called Project Raise.

ECF has now begun to explore how it can accelerate the impact of organisations working with boys on gender equality in other countries by sharing its knowledge. In order to achieve this, Equal Community Foundation has developed a framework that describes the capacity required to raise Gender Equitable Boys at a national level. Equal Community Foundation now wants to use this framework to help organisations in other countries to build local capacity.

The Challenges Group is helping ECF to develop and test the diagnostic tool that assesses the capacity of a country against the ECF framework. Will Muir, chief executive at Equal Community Foundation, said he wanted to focus on Rwanda because of its progressive policy on gender equality.

Working closely with ECF, the Challenges team have now developed a robust interview toolkit based on the ECF framework, which our team in Kigali has used to engage with sector experts in Rwanda.

Will added: “Although we’re specifically working to assess the current landscape in Rwanda, the plan is for ECF to hone its diagnostic so that it’s robust and flexible enough to be applied in any country, meaning the charity can both accelerate and grow its impact internationally.”