Spazio Donna, evaluation of the projects to foster women empowerment and contrast gender-based violence

Title Spazio Donna, empowerment femminile

Location Napoli, Roma, Cosenza – Italy

Duration January -December 2021

Partners
  • Brescia: Il Calabrone Cooperativa Sociale ETS
  • Milano Giambellino: We World
  • Napoli Scampia: We World
  • Roma San Basilio: Be Free Cooperativa Sociale

Funding Fondo di Beneficenza Intesa San Paolo

 

Context

The Spazio Donna project, promoted by WeWorld, has activated meeting and socialisation spaces in various Italian cities for women, including victims of violence, who live in difficult contexts. The various Women’s Spaces aim to develop and increase women’s empowerment and at the same time to foster the construction of an active, participatory, collaborative, non-discriminatory community of citizens capable of reducing gender-based violence through prevention and the emergence of risk situations.

Eight Women’s Spaces are active in Italy, in the cities of Milan, Brescia, Bologna, Rome, Naples, Cosenza and Pescara. Funding from the Intesa San Paolo Charity Fund has covered 4 of these Spaces, namely Brescia, Milan Giambellino, Rome and Naples.

In each Women’s Space, free interventions and initiatives are organised to promote women’s self-esteem, planning and autonomy through work on the various dimensions of empowerment. It is precisely the work on empowerment that triggers processes of awareness that, in many cases, bring to light situations of domestic violence. The Women’s Spaces represent, in fact, a place of emergence, a place where alarm bells can be identified in the stories brought by women.

In each city, the Women’s Space is managed by WeWorld’s partners, namely:

  • Brescia: Il Calabrone Cooperativa Sociale ETS
  • Milano Giambellino: We World
  • Napoli Scampia: We World
  • Roma San Basilio: Be Free Cooperativa Sociale

In the 12 months of the project, many women have been involved in theses Spaces, participating in psycho-physical wellbeing activities, training and work orientation activities, cultural activities, or have benefited from parenting support services.

 

General Objective

The M&E and Impact Evaluation Unit was involved to estimate the impact of the project on the empowerment of the beneficiaries based on their perceptions and degree of attribution of change associated with the different project actions.

 

Our contribution

The socio-economic-political context of the three cities in which the project is implemented is very different, and for these reasons the activities of each Space are implemented in a way that adapts to the context and needs of the beneficiaries, while maintaining a certain degree of uniformity in the actions and methodologies of intervention.

The evaluation methodology was therefore designed in such a way as to capture in all three projects the changes generated in the beneficiaries and main stakeholders, combined with the desk analysis of the documents produced within the project and the quantitative analysis of the data collected through the questionnaires administered to staff and women.

For the purpose of evaluation, Researchers privileged a participatory and qualitative methodology. In particular, they conducted semi-structured interviews and structured focus group discussion, in order to estimate the impact of the project on women’s empowerment starting from the perceptions of the beneficiaries and the degree of attribution of change associated with the different actions of the project.

Given the complexity of evaluating an empowerment process and in order to make the evaluation as standardised as possible, Researchers developed a Theoretical Framework on Empowerment on the basis of they elaborated the questionnaires. The success of each intervention was therefore measured on the basis of the degree of achievement of the empowerment dimensions identified as objectives for the beneficiaries.

Spazio Donna è un germoglio: qualcosa dove tutto può fiorire, e mi sono chiesta se potevo fiorire anche io. Ci ho provato, e sono fiorita.

Beneficiaria di Spazio Donna Cosenza

 

Read more on our M&E and Impact Evaluation Unit