What Works II Project Briefs 2026

What Works to Prevent Violence: Impact at Scale is a seven-year initiative (2021-2028) funded by the UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) to scale global evidence-based and practice-informed efforts to prevent violence against women and girls (VAWG).

Over fourteen projects, rigorous evaluations are exploring what works and assessing how effective approaches can be taken to scale. The grants include a number of focus areas:

• Innovation grants support the development and implementation of new or existing ideas with the transformative ability to contribute impact with potential for future scaling.

• Mainstream grants focus on integrating effective interventions, or key intervention components, into existing large-scale systems and infrastructure, in a way that is easily replicable by policymakers and practitioners.

• Transition to Scale grants support projects to evolve to the next stage on the pathway to scale. This may involve strengthening approaches to address multiple risk factors or types of violence, combining strategies, or adapting interventions to optimise them for scalability, particularly at the community and population levels.

• Scale grants expand and/or deepen evidence-based VAWG prevention programming and policy efforts in partnership with organisations, institutions and communities who share a commitment to sustainable change.

Learning is also being generated through What Works Ending Violence against Women and Children (VAWC) Helpdesk, which provides technical assistance to three multi-year FCDO programmes: a food security and livelihoods programme in Syria; a GBV prevention programme in South Sudan; and a climate resilience programme in Lebanon, Egypt, Jordan and the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

In addition, the Technology-facilitated GBV (TFGBV) Portfolio brings together five research grants administered through the Sexual Violence Research Initiative (SVRI), drawing on its global research networks and convening power to strengthen evidence on violence against women and girls. TFGBV is an emerging research area, and What Works is investing in building the evidence base.