Initiative aims to reduce gender-based violence in El Salvador

Downtown Phoenix campus

March 7, 2023

$35M USAID grant brings experts from around the university together to address issue

Arizona State University is leading a large, interdisciplinary initiative to help reduce gender-based violence in El Salvador, with the goal of stemming the flow of irregular migration to the United States.

The project, called “LibrES: For an El Salvador without Gender-Based Violence,” is being funded by a $35 million, five-year cooperative agreement awarded by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and will focus on three areas: prevention, protection and accountability, according to Neil Websdale, professor in the School of Social Work and director of the Family Violence Center at ASU.

“The idea is to reduce factors that push people, particularly vulnerable women and kids, out of El Salvador and up to the U.S. border by reducing gender-based violence, which is seen as a major driver for people to engage in the haphazard process of migration,” he said.

Gender-based violence is a persistent problem in El Salvador, with a significant proportion of Salvadoran women and girls experiencing some sort of violence, Websdale said.

The project will address gender-based violence in all its guises, including violence within families, stranger violence directed at women, intimidation, sex trafficking, child abuse and gang violence, Websdale added.

“All of those things are impediments to economic development and they lessen the opportunity for people in El Salvador to thrive,” he said.

Teams from across ASU are involved in the work:

The Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication is leading the design of media campaigns to address violent, controlling and abusive behavior by influencing how people think about gender roles and about violence against disabled and LGBTQ people.

The Thunderbird School of Global Management at ASU will train partners in El Salvador to use its DreamBuilder curriculum, which has been used by female entrepreneurs around the world to build skills to launch or improve their own businesses. This will raise the standard of living among people who might be tempted to migrate, and allow female survivors of gender-based violence to move toward economic independence. Thunderbird will also help to build capacity within in-country partner organizations to pursue further work with the U.S. government.

The Sandra Day O’Connor School of Law will help train Salvadoran prosecutors and law professors to develop more effective ways to bring gender-based violence cases into the legal system and to recognize how victims’ advocates can play a role.

The Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering will look at public infrastructure for parks and transportation in El Salvador to consider modifications that will decrease the harassment that is common in those spaces.

Charles Katz, professor and director of the Center for Violence Prevention and Community Safety in the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at ASU, will gather and analyze data with academic colleagues in El Salvador to support the work of the Institute for the Elimination of Gender-Based Violence.

The Family Violence Center will help form fatality review teams to identify deaths that are due to domestic violence for the purpose of informing violence prevention and victim protection programming. It will also facilitate community informed risk interventions to better triage high-risk cases of intimate partner violence.

“This type of transdisciplinary, community-embedded effort is leveraging the expertise of colleges across ASU as this group works collectively to prevent violence against women and girls in El Salvador,” said Cynthia Lietz, dean of the Watts College of Public Service and Community Solutions. “I am especially grateful to Dr. Neil Websdale and the Family Violence Center for all they are doing to lead this important, yet complicated project to positively impact communities locally and globally.”

Websdale, the project’s principal investigator, is an expert on domestic violence. He has worked extensively with law enforcement on administering the Arizona Intimate Partner Risk Assessment Instrument System, a tool for police to gather risk information from victims of intimate partner violence. The goal is to connect the victim with support services and also provide information to the judge at the bail hearing.

He is also the director of the National Domestic Violence Fatality Review Initiative, a resource center funded by the Office on Violence Against Women, a branch of the U.S. Department of Justice. It is housed at the Family Violence Center at ASU, where Websdale and his team provide training and assistance for domestic violence fatality review teams.

“In El Salvador, we hope we will bring a diverse group of players together at the table to discuss tragic outcomes like gender-based homicide with a view to developing interventions,” he said.

The USAID work will happen in three locations: San Salvador, San Miguel and Santa Ana. These urban centers have the highest rates of gender-based violence in the country.

The project’s success also depends heavily on the local team in El Salvador, who work closely with the partner organizations and implement technical programming, according to Brendan Fields, senior project manager for the Family Violence Center.

“They’re the ones leading the strategy in-country, designing work plans, meeting with partners and making connections with stakeholders,” he said.

In addition to reducing gender-based violence, the project will also work with local organizations to strengthen their financial, project and grant-management capacity so they can implement other USAID and donor-funded projects in the future.

“This major investment from USAID is a testament to ASU’s success in addressing challenging issues through community partnerships and transdisciplinary collaboration,” said Sally C. Morton, executive vice president of ASU’s Knowledge Enterprise. “The LibrES project will help save lives, improve the well-being for millions of Salvadorans, and positively impact many surrounding countries and states.”

By the end of the five-year timeline, the initiative will have provided services to 3,000 people, trained 1,000 people to advance gender equality and female empowerment outcomes, facilitated 250 training events, and generated more than 100,000 interactions with the public through communication campaigns.

The partner organizations in El Salvador are Urban Strategies, a faith-based organization composed of local churches; ASMujeres (the Salvadoran Women’s Association); MSM (the Salvadoran Women’s Movement); ASPRODE (Assistance to Programs and Projects in Development); FUNDEMAS (The Business Foundation for Social Action); FUNDE (The Foundation for Development); and the Francisco Gavidia University, a Cintanta Alliance member and the home for LibrES’s project offices.

The project launched in El Salvador in December, where Jamille Bigio, the USAID senior coordinator for gender equality and women’s empowerment in the Office of the Administrator, said: “For societies to prosper, all people must have the same rights, exercise their own voices, and live free from intimidation, assault, discrimination and violence.”

Top photo: Members of the theater troupe La Cachada Teatro, who are part of the LibrES resource partner Asociación Cultural Azoro, performed at the launch event for the LibrES initiative. Photo courtesy ASU

Mary Beth Faller

Reporter , ASU News

480-727-4503 marybeth.faller@asu.edu

SunSPOT model provides education access to areas with unreliable internet

Outdoor classroom at refugee camp in Ethiopia

Arizona State University is pioneering a game-changing new way to make education accessible to the many people around the world who live in areas with unreliable internet service.SunSPOT, for Solar Powered Offline Teaching, is a model created within ASU that allows people to wirelessly connect their smartphone, tablet or shared computer directly to a device at a centralized classroom. Using open-s...

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Global Engagement

SunSPOT model provides education access to areas with unreliable internet

March 7, 2023

Arizona State University is pioneering a game-changing new way to make education accessible to the many people around the world who live in areas with unreliable internet service.

SunSPOT, for Solar Powered Offline Teaching, is a model created within ASU that allows people to wirelessly connect their smartphone, tablet or shared computer directly to a device at a centralized classroom. Using open-source software, they can start engaging with their coursework in the classroom or transfer the content to their device to take home.

Lack of reliable internet is a huge problem around the world and an issue faced by Education for Humanity, ASU’s refugee education initiative, which has programs in about 20 countries.

Marc Alan Sperber, assistant director of Education for Humanity, led the creation and rollout of SunSPOT.

“One-third of the world’s population has never even used the internet, and many more than one-third don’t have reliable access,” he said.

Many of the Education for Humanity programs are offered in low- and middle-income countries where even unreliable internet can be prohibitively expensive.

“Many are being implemented in remote refugee camps with minimal infrastructure, and many are in unstable crisis contexts,” Sperber said.

"While far from being the only barrier, unreliable access to the internet plays a significant role in the fact that only 6% of refugees are able to access a higher education.

“Realistically, in the short term, getting the internet to these communities at scale is neither manageable nor affordable, and it certainly wouldn't be sustainable because the monthly internet bills would be in the millions of dollars,” he said.

“But it's immediately feasible and sustainable to bring offline-first learning to refugee communities at scale.”

So to close this gap, Sperber worked with others to design a flexible model that can be adapted by partner universities for their own distance-learning programs or managed by ASU units, such as Education for Humanity, for their own use.

Sperber worked with Beekee, a Swiss-based educational technology company that makes the Beekee Box and the Beekee Hub, portable hardware devices that SunSPOT learners connect to wirelessly.

After connecting, the learners use free apps such as Moodle or Kolibri, which are learning management systems that provide the lesson content and allow teachers to grade assignments and track student progress. Universities can use the system to push updated content to the field-based Beekee Hub and pull content back, such as homework assignments or learning analytics.

The Beekee device also can accept a SIM card, which can be used when it’s possible to connect to a cellular network. Because only one SIM card is needed for an entire learning community, this allows the project to be sustainable.

The Beekee devices don’t even require electricity. They can be charged and operated using a book-sized solar panel or an external battery system.

A Beekee Box. Photo courtesy Beekee

Sperber said he was particularly motivated to develop SunSPOT by the fact that a few years ago, Education for Humanity offered an entrepreneurship training program in Uganda, but only one-third of the students enrolled completed it and none of the young women did.

“This pilot was in Kampala, a capital city with good internet relative to most of where we work. This wasn't out in a remote refugee camp,” he said.

“Yet our partner's computer center still had horribly unreliable internet."

Learners would spend money on transportation to the computer center to participate in class only to discover that the internet was not working. Frustrated by the waste of time and money, they dropped out.

The SunSPOT model was shaped by Sperber’s work helping a USAID-funded project directed by the ASU Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College that needed a way to reach the most remote areas in Malawi with distance learning programs.

The southeastern African country of Malawi has struggled with getting enough skilled workers to grow the economy, in part because the programs offered by the country's public universities have been out of reach to most youth. With support from USAID, the ASU project, Strengthening Higher Education Access in Malawi Activity, or SHEAMA, has been focused on increasing the technical capacity of Malawi's higher education system and working with faculty to design and implement open, distance and e-learning courses that are aligned with market needs.

But connectivity was still a problem, exacerbated by the onset of the pandemic. An offline system was needed that the universities could each customize and manage. So Sperber worked with Beekee, and the company reworked its model, according to Sergio Estupiñán, a Beekee co-founder.

"Marc (Sperber)’s ideas were centered around the sustainability of initiatives that were initially relying on external funds and would eventually be without. He presented scenarios where funders will not want to invest in technologies that can only be purchased from one company, or that require annual contracts for ongoing tech support.

“We went from selling Beekee Boxes, Beekee Hubs and service contracts to being partners with ASU in their capacity-building efforts, taking full advantage of our open-source foundations and philosophies."

The SunSPOT model has already led to sustainable solutions, Sperber said. For example, the Malawian universities were trained on how to build, customize and manage their own SunSPOT systems, including the hardware and software. Then one of the universities decided to create a business around printing, assembling and supporting the systems for others in Malawi.

"This is exactly what you want to see in international development," said Stephen Feinson, associate vice president for the ASU International Development Initiative.

"We could walk away tomorrow and they would be able to continue rolling out and supporting new systems, extending the reach of their open, distance and e-learning programs indefinitely."

Going forward, Education for Humanity will use the SunSPOT offline-first model in all of its education programs, Sperber said, with support from the Mastercard Foundation in that pivoting process.

"Offline-first does not mean offline only," he said.

"Our courses will still be available online for learners who have access to the internet. Offline-first is more about our design approach, meaning that each time we make a design decision, we first think about the offline learner and making the entire experience great for them."

Sperber will be traveling to Lebanon this month to set up a refugee education program with SunSPOT.

Fewer populations face a more complex set of barriers in accessing a higher education than refugees, Sperber said. In 2017, when Education for Humanity launched, 1% of the world’s refugees were able to access higher education. Now it’s about 6%, he said. Education for Humanity typically offers courses to refugees in English, entrepreneurship and other skills-building subjects.

"Despite many successes, we've only been able to reach the tip of the iceberg," said Pamela DeLargy, Education for Humanity executive director and a professor of practice in politics and global studies.

"In crisis contexts around the world, there aren't the trained teachers or subject matter experts you need for face-to-face teaching.

“And even if there were, the unpaved roads going into refugee camps can get flooded when it rains, or travel into those regions can be sporadically off-limits because of security concerns.

“The way to reach refugees with education at scale has to include digital. But that's been a huge challenge because digital learning is primarily delivered online and so many displaced people around the world lack internet."

Top photo: An outdoor classroom in a refugee-hosting community in Tigray, Ethiopia. Photo courtesy Marc Alan Sperber