Effectiveness of community mobilisation and group-based interventions for preventing intimate partner violence against women in low- and middle-income countries: A systematic review and meta-analysis

BACKGROUND: Intimate partner violence (IPV) is a challenge affecting one in three women in their lifetime, and gender-transformative interventions have been identified as a promising prevention strategy. We systematically reviewed and meta-analysed randomised controlled trials (RCTs) of community-level or group-based interventions to prevent IPV in lower- and middle-income countries, seeking to answer the following research question: do community- or group-based gender-transformative interventions reduce IPV, compared to a control arm of status-quo programming? METHODS: We conducted a systematic search from the inception of all databases employed until 20 July 2021. Eligible study outcomes included past-year experience of physical, sexual, emotional or economic IPV self-reported by women and perpetration of physical or sexual IPV self-reported by men. We assessed study risk of bias using the updated Cochrane tool for RCTs. We estimated the pooled odds ratio (OR) using a multilevel random-effects meta-analysis and also conducted a multilevel meta-regression to analyse how study characteristics moderated the effect size. RESULTS: After screening 7363 unique records, we included 30 studies on 27 unique RCTs. Our meta-analysis suggested that community-level or group-based interventions reduced the odds of women experiencing IPV in the past year: pooled adjusted odds ratio (aOR) = 0.78; 95% confidence interval (CI) = 0.63-0.97. While there was significant heterogeneity in the effect sizes between trials (I(2) = 83%), potentially reflecting the diverse contexts of the included trials, our meta-regression did not indicate a significant association between intervention effectiveness and intervention type or target population. There was evidence of significant associations between effectiveness and intervention components and duration. DISCUSSION: There is strong evidence that community-level and group-based interventions reduce IPV against women. Unpacking what intervention modalities are effective in which contexts can further inform prevention strategies. REGISTRATION: PROSPERO (CRD42021290193).