No Means No Worldwide — IMPower & Ujamaa Empowerment Self-Defense and Bystander Programme, Nairobi

No Means No Worldwide (NMNW) and its Kenyan implementing partner Ujamaa-Africa run a paired six-week curriculum in Nairobi's informal settlements: 'IMPower' teaches adolescent girls verbal, physical and self-defense strategies to resist sexual assault, while 'Your Moment of Truth' trains adolescent boys to recognise coercive situations and safely intervene as bystanders. Both curricula are delivered by trained local instructors in upper-primary and secondary schools across settlements including Korogocho, Huruma, Dandora, Kibera and Mukuru.
A matched-pairs cluster-randomised controlled trial run by Stanford University researchers with Kenyan partners (October 2013–October 2014) enrolled 3,147 girls in 14 intervention schools and 2,539 girls in 14 control schools. Intervention schools saw a 3.7-percentage-point reduction in past-year sexual assault relative to controls (p=0.03), and among intervention-school girls who were subsequently assaulted, 35% reported using the self-defense skills they had learned to stop the assault. A separate 2015 study of the boys' bystander curriculum, involving 1,543 males aged 15–22 across 36 schools, found that trained participants were at least twice as likely as controls to safely intervene when witnessing an assault, with effects persisting at nine months.

Read the full analysis: https://nomeansnoworldwide.org/our-story