Democracy, Human Rights, and Governance

To make the greatest impact for sexual violence survivors, societies must remove barriers to justice. Physicians for Human Rights will use its innovations in multisectoral training, standardized forensic medical documentation, and institutional capacity development to bring to scale best practices for confronting conflict-related sexual violence in Kenya and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

BIG BAD BOO STUDIOS INC. (Big Bad Boo) is a Canadian production company that specializes in innovative educational programming.

Colonization has impacted Indigenous communities, particularly in the severing of Indigenous ways of knowing, being and doing. The problem addressed by this innovation is the continuance and resurrection of Indigenous knowledge, specifically harvesting in a traditional way out of the waters.

The problems the Sage Initiative is solving for are: the lack of access to capital by Indigenous-owned enterprises and the lack of impact investing literacy / opportunities for Indigenous womxn. Indigenous-owned businesses in Canada consistently report that their #1 barrier to growth is a lack of access to capital (CCAB 2016). Our vision is to make capital available to Indigenous social enterprises with the capital coming from Indigenous women investors.

Across Canada, Indigenous communities are disproportionately affected by sexual exploitation of women and children. This project aims to reach at risk indigenous women, girls, and 2SLGBTTQQIA+ people who are experiencing such challenges. Substantive research and evidence on the history of sexual violence, exploitation and sex trafficking of Indigenous women/girls supports the need for this work and its importance for our community. Further, economic investments for Indigenous women are needed now more than ever due to the uncertainty created by COVID-19 global pandemic.

Misinformation plays a central in the continuation and escalation of conflict as well as complicating humanitarian responses. State and non-state actors alike take advantage of chaos and uncertainty to further their objectives at the expense of the people who must live and cope with the conflict each day. Divided into several elements, misinformation combines the spread of false information, misrepresentation of factual information, and the inherent denial of factual events.

The traditional approaches of delivering legal aid services to target groups are mainly based on human resources and interaction. Hence, they are limited by time, resources available, access constraints and geography while the legal needs of the target groups vastly outstrip the supply of services. Moreover, traditional non-digital case management approaches limit beneficiary access to case accurate real-time updates on progress and do not allow capable beneficiaries to self-serve their case.

Needs assessments are inaccurate and slow in multilingual contexts, a poor basis for humanitarian strategies. TWB’s research shows that data collectors often do not speak the languages of affected people, do not understand humanitarian terminology and have limited training. Information is translated 2 or 3 times, making the process slow and error prone. The voices and needs of affected people are lost; aid efforts are designed and continued based on incomplete or inaccurate information.

The equality effect’s 160 Girls project addresses the issue of child rape by creating systemic change using the law. The equality effect uses the law to ensure that the police enforce child rapes laws already on the books, so as to end impunity for child rape, and reduce rape and its harmful health impacts. Two thirds of girls in Kenya are sexually assaulted before they reach 18. By reducing the incidence of rape through the elimination of impunity, the harmful health impacts of rape will be reduced.

Amanda Nguyen of Rise International in the U.S. will scale-up the existing grassroots social justice movement that they have established in the U.S. to create actionable recommendations to support the rights of survivors of sexual violence worldwide. Thirty-five percent of women – 1.3 billion people worldwide – are survivors of sexual assault, but many are denied basic rights and access to justice. Rise International’s approach involves communicating survivor stories, building alliances with influential people, and maximizing visibility through media coverage.