Still a leap of faith: microfinance initiatives for reduction of violence against women and children in low-income and middle-income countries

Summary box Economic strengthening interventions are proposed to reduce interpersonal violence, including intimate partner violence (IPV) and violence against children (VAC) in low-income and middle-income countries (LMICs).1–5 This proposition is intuitive, as economic or poverty status and violence are typically correlated.6 7 However, economic interventions are not uniform. Programmes such as social safety nets (eg, cash or in-kind transfers); livelihood, employment or entrepreneurship programmes; microcredit and savings or broader economic policy instruments (eg, tax credits or fiscal subsidies) induce diverse behavioural changes leading to a variety of outcomes by nature of their different designs and target populations. Further, impacts on violence and its predictors may vary by context according to the levels of generalised poverty and cultural or gender norms. Given the global scale of violence, it is imperative to identify effective prevention strategies through rigorous testing in multiple contexts building a reliable evidence base, before recommending scale-up for violence reduction. One type of economic intervention, microfinance institutions (MFIs), including microcredit, micro-savings and individual or group village savings and loan associations (VSLAs), have been highlighted as promising interventions for reducing VAC/IPV by INSPIRE, a multinational partnership launched in July 2016.5 The INSPIRE package is led by the WHO in collaboration with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), End Violence Against Children: The Global Partnership, the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), Together for Girls, …