Two senior researchers from the James P Grant School of Public Health, BRAC Unviersity (JPGSPH) attended the WILDAF-IDRC ‘Measuring’ Social Changes: What works? at Lome, Togo from 16-17 January 2017. Dr. Julie Evans (Research and Project Coordinator, JPGSPH) and Rashida Akhter (Research Coordinator, JPGSPH) participated as part of the IDRC-funded project on “Preventing early and child marriage in poor urban settlements”.
Both Dr Evans and Ms Akhter presented their project; Ms Akhter provided an overview of the research project, discussing its goals, methods and early findings while Dr Evans presented on “What do we mean by Social Change?” and “Pathways to Social Change”, drawing on the Bangladeshi context and the project's theory of change.
The workshop brought together experts, researchers, and acamedicians of IDRC-funded gender programmes from West Africa and South Asia, with representatives from Togo, Benin, Senegal, Cameroon, Mali, Niger, Burkino Faso, Canada, the UK, Pakistan, India and Bangladesh. These agents of change discussed the pathways to social change for gender programmes, experiences on social change in relation to their research and programmes on gender, child marriage and gender-based violence, and exploring evidence around feasible pathways to achieve social change.