After evaluating 20 sexual violence prevention activities across 19 countries—spanning women’s economic empowerment, environmental conservation, migrant support, and community-based organizations—NORC’s research reveals a critical insight: a significant barrier to effective sexual violence programming is not a lack of good ideas, but the failure to systematically share knowledge and coordinate across different activities.

For policymakers and program directors designing the next generation of sexual violence interventions, this finding has profound implications. The future of effective sexual violence prevention lies not in creating more standalone programs, but in building deliberate bridges between existing efforts.

For this portfolio evaluation, NORC examined four distinct USAID activity clusters operating in parallel, all focused on sexual violence prevention in different contexts:

• Better Together Challenge, supporting Venezuelan migrants experiencing violence
• Collective Action to Reduce Sexual Violence (CARE-SV), helping those experiencing vicarious trauma due to working with survivors
• Resilient Inclusive & Sustainable Environments (RISE), addressing sexual violence in environmental programming
• Women’s Economic Empowerment activities, addressing violence experienced by women due to economic empowerment

Each demonstrated promising approaches—from engaging men in prevention to creating safe spaces for survivors—yet some grantees reported that formal collaboration meetings had “little space for knowledge sharing” and that peer learning happened only informally.

This structural gap matters because sexual violence prevention faces consistent challenges across contexts:

• Limited baseline data for needs assessments, especially for activities that are the first of their kind in a specific location
• Insufficient resources for adaptive management when crises emerge
• Difficulty sustaining local partner capacity beyond initial funding periods

When implementing partners address these challenges in isolation, they repeatedly reinvent solutions that others have already developed. 

The 20 activities NORC evaluated made reasonable progress toward planned objectives and indicated positive outcomes for survivors of sexual violence, communities, and local stakeholders. Environmental conservation organizations expressed interest in replicating approaches; women’s economic empowerment activities demonstrated that male involvement reduces sexual violence; and organizations addressing xenophobia found effective ways to build awareness through radio, television, and community platforms.

Yet important knowledge and practice gaps persist—particularly around incorporating international evidence alongside local context, addressing power dynamics and male involvement from the beginning, and managing vulnerabilities exacerbated by unplanned crises. These are precisely the challenges that coordinated approaches can address more effectively than isolated programs.

Sexual violence intersects with multiple sectors such as environment, economics, migration, governance, and community norms. Effective prevention must reflect that complexity through deliberate coordination, adequate resources for knowledge sharing, and funding structures that incentivize collaboration rather than competition. The evidence is clear: we have information about what works. The imperative now is ensuring that knowledge reaches those who need it.

• Revise funding assumptions to enable effective design. Sexual violence prevention requires funding that covers:
  • Paid staff rather than relying on unpaid community volunteers
  • Compensation for diverse beneficiary representatives to engage in program design
  • Capacity-building in fundraising and grant development so smaller organizations can sustain work beyond initial funding periods.
• Require formal coordination mechanisms from the start. Build grantee exchange and coordination directly into workplans and budgets, not as optional add-ons. The evaluation showed that when implementing partners had resources and structures for coordination, they successfully fostered knowledge-sharing, built capacity, and increased collaboration among grantees. For example, learning from each other and partnering with local organizations led to an increase in engaging men in programming to prevent sexual violence.
• Require exit plans and sustainability strategies upfront. Have program implementers articulate how they will remain accountable to program participants after funding ends and develop these plans in partnership with local organizations from the beginning. Findings suggested that engaging with local stakeholders—governments, community leaders, and grassroots organizations—and attempts to secure more funding are critical for sustainability.
• Develop portfolio-level theories of change (ToC). Create overarching frameworks that articulate how different sexual violence prevention initiatives connect and reinforce each other, rather than treating each grant as an isolated intervention. A portfolio ToC can help articulate investment causal pathways to achieve effective intervention models that guide investments and help identify what is working or not.
• Ensure adequate timeframes for norm change. Design performance periods reflecting the reality that changing traditional norms around gender and violence requires sustained engagement—typically longer than initial grant periods assume.

For donors and program directors, effective sexual violence prevention requires:

• Adequate funding that pays individuals involved in activities, includes diverse beneficiary participation in design while prioritizing survivors who are safe from violence, and builds fundraising capacity for sustainability, while moving away from reliance on unpaid volunteers.
• Sufficient timeframes that reflect the reality of changing traditional norms and embedded biases.
• Clear portfolio-level theories of change that guide implementation pathways and adaptive management to improve results.
• Meaningful male engagement in training, sensitization, and advocacy from the program design phase.
• Structured coordination between grantees to share lessons learned, challenges, and successes.
• Monitoring systems that enable grantees to use emerging data for adaptive management while streamlining administrative processes that hinder flexibility.
• Exit planning in all workplans to ensure accountability to participants and community ownership beyond funding periods.

Our findings suggest policymakers and funders should shift from funding individual sexual violence interventions to building coordinated portfolios with deliberate knowledge-sharing mechanisms. This includes developing portfolio-level theories of change for sexual violence investments, adopting complex systems approaches that recognize how social and structural interactions influence effectiveness, and revising procurement and grant-making structures to incentivize coordination across implementing partners.

Greater investment in local partner capacity—including compensation for community expertise and fundraising skill-building—creates sustainable prevention ecosystems rather than time-limited projects.