Parenting for Respectability: Proof of concept ‘Before – and – After’ outcome evaluation of an early prevention intervention to reduce child maltreatment and gender based violence in Uganda (2016 – 2018)

Project background

Evidence of effective, culturally relevant parenting programmes from low and middle income is extremely limited. Of the handful of programmes that exist, very few deliberately seek to address outcomes associated with both intimate partner violence and child maltreatment, nor do they leverage cultural drivers or pre-existing motivations to change behaviour. In Uganda particularly, little attention has been paid to one of the most important dimensions of fatherhood: the need to maintain the family’s respectability, in large part achieved through the appropriate behaviour of the children and their parents (Siu, Seeley & Wight, 2013). This core motivation might be harnessed in the design of interventions to reduce spousal violence, modify negative parenting and encourage sensitive parenting, in order to reduce children’s future risk of sexual, physical and/or emotional violence. Over the past few years, a research team from Makerere University in collaboration with the MRC/CSO Social and Public Health Sciences Unit Glasgow and the MRC/UVRI Uganda Research Unit in AIDS, in partnership with the SVRI have been working on the development of a parenting intervention – the “Parenting for Respectability Programme (PfR)” that seeks to leverage this core motivation. PfR is a 16 session manualised programme with 9 single sex and 7 mixed sex sessions, delivered once a week by local facilitators.

Through this current project we will test varying combinations of components of the programme to provide further evidence of their acceptability in different contexts, plausibility of the measures, the intended mechanism of change and the effects of the intervention on key outcomes associated with SGBV and child maltreatment in Uganda.

Project Aim

This project aims to evaluate whether PfR is effective in modifying familial factors underlying child maltreatment and intimate partner violence: poor attachment, harsh parenting, highly gendered socialisation and partner conflict.

The objective is to:

Conduct a ‘proof of concept’ before-and-after outcome evaluation of PfR recently piloted by CHDC, Makerere University, to generate initial quantitative evidence of the effectiveness of the programme in modifying key outcome measures on parent-child relationships, relationships between partners and SGBV.

Project activities

The project activities includes setting up the project, obtaining ethical clearance, negotiating access and the first advisory group meeting, training initial facilitators for first round of implementation. Additionally, baseline questionnaires will be administered with 10 group during the implementation. The second area of activities includes recruiting and training facilitators for second round implementation (participants in first round). There will be follows-up with all group and last area of activities will be on analysing and write up data, revising the programme and manual.