From Evidence to Scale: Building Models to Embed Parenting Support in National Systems and Implementer Platforms to Prevent Violence and Family Separation
Presented By:
How can we successfully leverage Partnerships between Governmental Agencies, Implementing Partners and researchers to advance evidence-based parenting models and translate into impact at scale to prevent violence against children and family separation?
This session examines the violence–separation nexus in Uganda and presents Parenting for Respectability (PfR), an African-developed, evidence-based parenting intervention shown to significantly reduce child maltreatment and intimate partner violence.
PfR model is aligned with global frameworks such as INSPIRE, the End Violence Against Children (EVAC) agenda, WHO Nurturing Care Framework, and national care reform efforts. It provides a compelling example of multi-stakeholder collaboration, where government engagement with academia and NGOs has enabled the translation of evidence into national family and parenting policy frameworks, standards, and coordinated implementation, including contributions to the Draft National Family Policy and national parenting guidelines.
Grounded in experience-based perspectives, the session supports participants to co-develop system-level solutions to strengthen families and scale prevention.
Speakers
Godfrey Siu - Senior Lecturer and Lead of the Families, Parenting and Child Health Programme, Child Health and Development Centre, Makerere University
Beatrice Akello - National Advocacy and Gender Equality Coordinator, SOS Children's Villages Uganda
Lucy Otto - Assistant Commissioner, Family, Ministry of Gender, Labour and Social Development, Government of Uganda
Session Aims
Our goal is to highlight best practices for innovatively and collaboratively building consensus and addressing challenges that may arise when building a model of research, policy and implementation partnership with government and an implementing agency.
Specifically, we will:
- Demonstrate how family strengthening and parenting interventions can act as system-level levers to simultaneously reduce violence and prevent family breakdown by addressing shared risk factors.
- Translate rigorous evidence and programme theory into actionable policy pathways, highlighting how multi-stakeholder collaboration enables scale and national child protection system integration.
- Co-develop policy-relevant recommendations for embedding parenting support within national child protection systems, grounded in both evidence and lived experience.
Session Format
5 min - Lived-experience policy anchor: Structured testimony from the leader of the Uganda Care Leavers Network
15 min - Targeted inputs (evidence + scale + system integration): Evidence, theory of change, and pathways to national policy integration and standards
25 min - Interactive lab:
- Live polling (Slido): drivers of violence and separation, system bottlenecks
- Small-group exercise: You are advising a government aiming to reduce violence and child-family separation by 20% in 5 years. How would you integrate parenting support into your system?"
10 min - Synthesis: Consolidation into policy recommendations feeding into the session output