TEKEDU Social innovation and adolescents’ empowerment for eradication of all forms of violence
The EVA project - strengthened gender action in Cahul and Ungheni districts
The purpose of the project
This project aims to ensure that adolescents and young people, especially the most vulnerable groups are empowered to act as social agents of change in their communities to address all types of violence in all settings: child maltreatment, sexual violence, psychological violence, bullying and witnessing violence. This component is an entry point to target the reduction of inequalities for the most vulnerable adolescents and young people (namely, youth and adolescent girls and boys from rural communities) by enlarging the focus and giving more attention to broader social, economic and institutional environments in which children and adolescents live (family, school, community).Therefore, the project aims to empower girls and boys to exercise and advocate for right to live free of violence; seek help when violence occurs; and build healthy, gender-equitable, non-violent relationships.
The project focuses on the UPSHIFT Programme that promotes the empowering of adolescents as local innovators to seek and identify solutions to social problems through bottom-up approaches in order to challenge the prevailing social norms and gender stereotypes that lead to violent behaviour. Increasing opportunities for influencing local culture affecting adolescents and youth lives and wellbeing, is consonant with overarching goals and priority sectors of the EU Youth Strategy as well as Moldova's National Youth Strategy 2020.
The Project proposal, UPSHIFT – Building a Culture of non-violence edition, has three main components to contribute to:
- Strengthening knowledge of adolescents and youth to identify, report, prevent and address all forms of violence in all settings in their communities;
- empowering adolescents to act as agents of change in addressing negative social norms and gender stereotypes contributing to violent behaviour
- Establish a culture of non-violence by mobilizing communities to change social norms and gender stereotypes contributing to violent behaviour
The first component of the project will focus on the acquirement of a pool of trainers (10 trainers) capacitated to strengthen adolescents and youth knowledge on Gender Based Violence (GBV) and Violence against children (VAC). The trainers will also be capacitated to deliver the UPSHIFT methodology in order to develop and contribute to the implementation of the adolescents’ projects ideas as agents of change for the stereotypical social norms regarding violence in their communities, especially GBV. The capacitated trainers will deliver training to at least 100 adolescents that will be selected to expand their project ideas.
