There are always challenges within all community interventions to seeing cause and effect and the impact. What we do really effectively, I think, is evaluate our programs for the experience of participants prior to and following.
I can speak to one particular initiative that we did in Zambia where we helped to create what we think is the world's first gender transformative financial literacy program. We found in a particular mining community in Zambia that incidents of violence were happening because men and women were talking about money, and then violence would erupt in a household. By creating this training program, we were able to see within that community a significant decrease in reported incidents of gender violence at this work site. We started with a baseline with the participants in our program. We checked in as the program was happening, and then a couple years out, we checked back to see what the incidence levels were. Those were some of the measures that we were able to do in that context.
That was a specific initiative that we had some parameters around, but it is certainly a challenge for all social scientists and all community programmers to figure out how to measure the impact of the work they're doing, especially if it's in the primary prevention space where you're not just counting numbers and doing the response pieces. It continues to be a challenge and a big question for everyone, but we're able to measure our programming at that level.