Piloting femicide reviews in South Africa
What if every life lost to femicide could teach us something about how to prevent the next one?
South Africa’s first Femicide Review Pilot explores this. Rather than treating femicide only as a statistic, the pilot takes a systematic approach to examining the circumstances surrounding each case, asking what happened, why it happened, where systems may have failed, and whether there were opportunities for earlier intervention.
This makes femicide reviews an important and innovative approach to Evidence-Informed Decision-Making (EIDM). The value of evidence is not simply in generating another report or documenting what we already know. It lies in creating knowledge that can be used to improve decisions, strengthen accountability and inform action. The pilot seeks to identify patterns, systemic gaps and missed opportunities for intervention, generating insights that can inform policies, programmes, services and resource allocation.
The pilot brings together the Pan-African Collective for Evidence (PACE), Department of Planning, Monitoring and Evaluation (DPME), Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC), The Presidency of the Republic of South Africa, Centre for the Study of Violence and the Foundation for Human Rights (FHR) around a shared commitment to strengthening evidence-informed responses to Gender-Based Violence and Femicide.
Ultimately, the question is not only what we know about femicide, but what we do with what we learn. Read more about this initiative here.
