Women's Empowerment through Gender-Based Violence Services (WEGS)

active

Prospective

The project will implement an integrated, survivor-centered approach to supporting GBV survivors in Moldova, including refugee women. The integrated approach to providing all needed services and assistance will include economic empowerment of project beneficiaries to support women and their families in GBV response and prevention so that they can restart and sustain their lives free of violence. In Component 1, the project will offer housing assistance to those fleeing their abusers and will provide emergency response, psychosocial counselling, legal aid, social assistance, and the full chain of support (including personal development, professional orientation, and market-demanded job skills training and assisted employment or business development training and start-up funding) toward sustainable income generation in wage employment, self-employment, or micro-entrepreneurship. Because Russia's invasion of Ukraine has substantially increased the vulnerability of women and children fleeing the war zone, refugee women and children from Ukraine who are potential victims of GBV are included among project beneficiaries, with customized support to meet their needs. Component 2 of the project aims to help implement recent legal amendments to strengthen Moldova's institutional mechanism for combating violence against women and domestic violence. This strengthening will occur through (a) capacity building of specialized public institutions and nongovernmental actors; and (b) prevention-focused community awareness-raising about the impact of GBV and about available GBV services. The project will support recent reforms by the Government of Moldova, including the establishment of the National Agency for Combating Violence against Women and Domestic Violence in January 2024. The project is well timed to contribute to building long-term capacity of the government and its NGO partners to support Moldovan and refugee GBV survivors and their children who are GBV survivors. Although the domestic legal framework provides for multi-stakeholder responses, the holistic, multidimensional approach is not well developed in Moldova. The project will showcase the difference that various multi-stakeholder interventions make to the lives of the survivors. The project will undertake process evaluations and use resulting lessons to produce GBV Prevention and Response Guidance Notes, which will be used by interested stakeholders (government agencies, NGOs, development agencies) for scaling up and further improvement of GBV services, based on lessons learned. Project activities will contribute to the implementation of the National Program on Preventing and Combating Violence against Women and Family Violence for the years 2023-2027, including General Objective 2. (Protection Pillar): Strengthening the protection and assistance mechanism for victims of violence against women and family violence through a multidimensional approach, according to the provisions of the Istanbul Convention.

FY17 - Education,FY17 - Health,FY17 - Information and Communications Technologies,FY17 - Public Administration,FY17 - Social Protection

World Bank Group

Project

Commercial, Government, Education