One Man Can — Sonke Gender Justice's Community Mobilisation Campaign Against Gender-Based Violence

Launched in Johannesburg and Cape Town in November 2006, Sonke Gender Justice's One Man Can campaign uses multi-day workshops, trained community mobilisers and local advocacy to engage men and boys in preventing gender-based violence (GBV) and HIV risk behaviour, and has since been adapted in other African settings including Sudan.
A cluster-randomised controlled trial in 22 villages of the Agincourt health and demographic surveillance site (Mpumalanga, South Africa), running April 2012–June 2014, found more than a third of men aged 18–35 in intervention villages attended at least one workshop. The trial recorded a statistically significant improvement in men's self-reported gender-equitable attitudes and a non-significant trend toward lower IPV victimisation among women (adjusted odds ratio 0.53, 95% CI 0.24–1.16) — but no significant reduction in men's self-reported violence perpetration, the programme's central target outcome (Treves-Kagan et al., 2019, Culture, Health & Sexuality).
Earlier qualitative work (Dworkin et al., 2013, Men and Masculinities; van den Berg et al., 2013, Gender & Development) documented shifts in participants' accounts of fatherhood and parenting, but relied on retrospective self-report without a control group. Some widely circulated figures (e.g., that 50% of participants "took action" against GBV) could not be traced to a locatable primary evaluation and are not used here.

Read the full analysis: https://genderjustice.org.za/one-man-can/