IMAGE — South Africa's Microfinance-Plus-Gender-Training Trial That Cut Partner Violence by 55% Among Participants

The Intervention with Microfinance for AIDS and Gender Equity (IMAGE) combined a group microfinance programme, delivered by the Small Enterprise Foundation, with a participatory learning and action curriculum on gender, power, communication and HIV integrated into the fortnightly loan meetings. It targeted poor women in rural Limpopo province, South Africa.
In the evaluation published in The Lancet in 2006, eight villages were pair-matched and randomly allocated to receive the intervention at once (four villages) or three years later (four comparison villages). Three cohorts were followed: direct participants or matched controls (cohort one), randomly selected household co-residents aged 14 to 35 (cohort two), and randomly selected community members (cohort three).
In cohort one, past-year experience of physical or sexual intimate-partner violence was reduced by 55% (adjusted risk ratio 0.45, 95% CI 0.23-0.91; adjusted risk difference -7.3%, 95% CI -16.2 to 1.5). There was no effect on unprotected sex with a non-spousal partner (aRR 1.02 in cohort two; 0.89 in cohort three) or on HIV incidence (1.06, 0.66-1.69).
Caveats: only eight villages were randomised, analysis was per protocol, the risk-difference interval includes zero, and the benefit was confined to women who joined the programme; the community-level HIV and sexual-risk targets were not met.

Read the full analysis: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140673606697444/abstract