Building knowledge, supporting evidence generation, and learning from practice to prevent and reduce violence in South Africa has been a focus of the work of the Justice and Violence Prevention team at the ISS for many years. Our long-term goal is to ensure that evidence-led interventions reduce and prevent violence in South Africa.

The Forum seeks to achieve this by:

Convening and facilitating processes that bring together policy makers, researchers, NGOs, development partners and the private sector to interact, build relationships and solve problems
Generating and synthesising research evidence to support the implementation of violence prevention interventions
Developing and testing new interventions to prevent violence, and
Offering workshops and training courses to build the capacity and knowledge of government officials, development partners, practitioners and researchers

In 2015, the ISS established the multisectoral Violence Prevention Forum (VPF) with the long-term goal of ensuring that evidence and data are used to inform the large-scale implementation of programmes, policies and interventions to prevent violence. The Forum includes stakeholders from government, civil society, researchers, development partners and the private sector.