Pathways to empowerment in Gender-Based Violence prevention project aims at creating the learning opportunities and/or conditions for empowerment through awareness-raising interventions to strengthen the capacity, the knowledge, skills, and attitudes of the youth workers who are gender diversity and LGBTIQ+ rights advocates as a means to meet their learning needs or knowledge gap in a sustainable manner, to effectively tackle Gender-Based Violence through youth work at the community level.

Given the multi-sectoral nature of preventive and response measures which gender-based violence requires, we aim at mainstreaming gender-based violence prevention through youth work, by creating the learning materials with information on how gender-based violence survivors can report the incidents and have timely, nondiscriminatory access to services and support: psychosocial, legal, material assistance and safe spaces for emotional support.

The project approach focuses on primary prevention, changing gender and social norms to end tolerance of the different forms of prejudices, stereotypes and behaviours that encourage or minimise Gender-Based Violence. If young people, potential victims, survivors or perpetrators of Gender-Based Violence are educated on the actual harm which Gender-Based Violence causes, they can learn how to make better decisions to become the leaders among their peers in addressing and preventing Gender-Based Violence.

The project overall objective is therefore to strengthen the capacities of youth workers through training: ensure they are familiar with the strategies for creating learning opportunities to facilitate youth empowerment in GBV prevention, as a means to effectively strengthen prevention measures and responses to GVB; and ensure that they are familiar with GBV analysis to better identify risk and protective factors to develop selective programmes to meet the learning needs and knowledge gaps among survivors and offenders.