Impact evaluation of combining women’s economic support and the Indashyikirwa couple’s curriculum to mitigate Intimate Partner Violence in Syria

Final Impact Report of the Syria Resilience Initiative’s (SRI) Violence Against Women and Girls (VAWG) Intervention

Executive Summary

Background: Women in Syria face heightened risks of Gender-Based Violence (GBV), including Intimate Partner Violence (IPV), partly due to the conflict. The Building Local Resilience in Syria (BLRS) programme is testing different strategies to transform harmful gender attitudes and reduce IPV. In Al-Hasakah, the Syria Resilience Initiative (SRI) provides cash transfers to women and implements the 21-session Indashyikirwa couple’s curriculum aiming to promote women’s economic and social participation and reduce economic, emotional and physical IPV.

Impact evaluation objective and learning questions: The evaluation causally estimates whether cash transfers, combined with the couple’s curriculum, reduces IPV, strengthens joint household decision-making, promotes gender-equitable attitudes and enhances women’s empowerment. The key research questions are: 

• LQ1: What are the immediate effects of combining the couple’s curriculum with economic support on women’s experiences of economic, emotional, and physical IPV and men’s perpetration of economic IPV? 
• LQ2: What are the impacts on the joint decision-making for wives and husbands? 
• LQ3: Does the intervention influence women’s attitudes about wife-beating and  wives’ and husbands’ gender attitudes? 
• LQ4: Does the intervention affect women’s engagement in income generating activities and time spent on work? Are there add-on effects of the couple’s curriculum in improving livelihood and food security outcomes of couples compared to only the economic support? 

Impact evaluation design and analysis: To answer these questions, ISDC in collaboration with SRI, designed and implemented a cluster randomised controlled trial involving 610 couples. Causal short-term impacts were estimated using OLS regressions with round fixed effects and village-clustered standard errors, with appropriate robustness checks.

Curriculum attendance: More than 80% of couples attended at least one session and 77% of couples attended 17+ sessions. Attendance was similar among husbands and wives. Older couples and husbands with disabilities were less likely to complete the programme, while wealthier, income-generating couples were more likely to do so. 

Baseline IPV: Baseline IPV prevalence was high: 44%, 64%, and 27% of women reported experiencing economic, emotional and physical in the prior 12 months, respectively. Twenty percent of men reported perpetrating economic IPV.