Impact Assessment of the Rural Response System to Reduce Violence Against Women in the Central Region of Ghana

The Rural Response System (RRS) was designed as a community-based intervention to address major problems related to VAW in Ghana. These include poor institutional response to VAW, high degree of tolerance of VAW in the Ghanaian society due to strong perceptions that domestic violence is a private matter, the general confusion about what constitutes violence and ignorance about the causes, consequences and mechanisms that perpetuate VAW. The RRS uses the strategy of trained community members known as Community-based action team (COMBAT) to undertake awareness-raising on gender-based violence as well as providing support to victims of violence to access justice.

The impact evaluation study is a two-arm mixed methods unmatched cluster randomised controlled trial designed to evaluate the impact of the Rural Response System (RRS) in reducing violence against women. The study was conducted in rural and urban communities in 4 districts located in the Central Region of Ghana and involved 2 quantitative cross-sectional surveys done pre- and post-intervention in 20 communities in the 4 districts. Apart from quantitative surveys, the study also collected a series of qualitative data.