IRC New Foundations award: Niamh Gaynor

Dr Niamh Gaynor of the School of Law and Government and the IICRR has received an IRC New Foundations award to investigate community approaches to tackling gender-based violence (GBV) in Malawi. While the importance of cultural norms and behaviours in driving GBV and the attendant need to involve men as well as women in community interventions to address this are now well recognised, few studies to date have explored effective ways of achieving this. This project, a collaboration with ActionAid, will explore the effectiveness of approaches involving both women and men in ActionAid’s programmes in Chiradzulu and Rumphi districts in Malawi. Its findings will inform ActionAid Ireland’s programming and policy in Malawi and more broadly in Africa as well as, through the Irish Consortium on Gender Based Violence, the broader NGO and development community based in Ireland. Niamh’s research focuses on the ways in which social and political inequalities, including gender inequalities, come to be produced and reproduced.

Having lived and worked in West Africa in the past, Niamh specialises in the politics of development in Sub-Saharan Africa and has conducted field work in over twenty African countries. Her most recent work, a collaboration with Trócaire, was on local governance and citizen participation in the African Great Lakes region. This work, which informed Trócaire’s Gender and Governance programmes in the region, has been published in the Community Development Journal, the Development Policy Review, the Journal of Contemporary African Studies, the Journal of International Development, and the Review of African Political Economy.