EMAP — Engaging Men Through Accountable Practice, Eastern DRC

Engaging Men through Accountable Practice (EMAP) is a structured, 16-week discussion-group curriculum for men, developed and run by the International Rescue Committee (IRC) as a men's-engagement strand of its gender-based-violence prevention work in conflict-affected communities. In North and South Kivu, eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, IRC delivered EMAP alongside an accountability structure linking participating men to women's advisory groups that monitored behaviour change.
A two-armed, matched-pair cluster-randomised controlled trial across 28 communities (1,387 men and 1,220 women at baseline, with 96–97% follow-up retention) evaluated EMAP between 2016 and 2018. The evaluation, run with the World Bank's Africa Gender Innovation Lab and published in BMJ Global Health, found statistically significant improvements in men's stated intentions to avoid violence, reduced acceptance of wife-beating (OR 0.59, p<0.01), and increased agreement that women can refuse sex (OR 1.47, p<0.05).
Despite these attitudinal shifts, the trial found no statistically significant reduction in women-reported past-year physical or sexual intimate partner violence (OR 0.95, p=0.71). This honest null result on the primary violence outcome is an important caution for programmes that rely on attitude and norms change alone: changing what men said and believed did not translate, in this setting and timeframe, into a measurable drop in the violence women experienced.

Read the full analysis: https://www.rescue.org/eu/report/guide-male-engagement-workshops-engaging-men-through-accountable-practice-emap-approach