We Can End All Violence Against Women (‘We Can’) in South Asia is an extraordinary, viral campaign targetting violence against women, reaching millions of men and women across six countries and subsequently spreading to other countries in Africa, Europe and the Americas.

What’s different about ‘We Can’ (apart from its scale) is that it is not primarily concerned with changing policies, laws, constitutions or lobbying the authorities. Instead, it aims to go to scale, by changing attitudes and beliefs about gender roles at community level. The campaign also seeks to involve men as well as women, with remarkable success, and its origins lie in a South–South exchange with the ‘We Can’ methodology being developed from VAW community programmes in Uganda.

This case study evaluates the ‘We Can’ campaign in order to explore how change happens and inform future programme design and ways of working. This publication forms part of a series of Active Citizenship Case Studies.