Promundo is a global leader in promoting gender justice and preventing violence by engaging men and boys in partnership with women and girls.

They believe that working with men and boys to transform harmful gender norms and unequal power dynamics is a critical part of the solution to achieve gender equality. For the empowerment of women and girls to continue advancing, men and boys must see themselves as allies in the process. Men and boys also benefit when harmful norms are challenged. Their research, programs, and advocacy efforts show that promoting healthy masculinity (or positive notions of “what it means to be a man”) and femininity (or “what is means to be a woman”) leads to improvements in men’s own lives, and in the lives of women and girls.

Their programs strive to create change at multiple levels: in addition to working with individual men and women, they use campaigns and local activism to build community support, and advocate with institutions and governments to adopt policies and scale up programs that reinforce personal and social change.

Since its founding in Brazil in 1997, Promundo has worked to advance gender equality around the world through formative research and rigorous evaluation, implementing evidence-based educational and community-wide programs, and partnering with women’s rights groups. Their advocacy campaigns, community mobilization, group education, and group therapy create safe spaces for men and women in post-conflict and high-violence settings to heal from trauma, for youth in over 22 countries to question harmful gender norms, and for men around the world to discuss the benefits of involved fatherhood and shared decision-making, and the costs of violence and exploitation.

Major organizations including the United Nations, World Bank, the World Health Organization and national governments have supported their cause by working jointly on their initiatives or by adopting their programs and rolling them out in other communities around the world.

Promundo is funded by national and local governments, foundations, bilateral and multilateral aid organizations, major nongovernmental agencies, and individual donations.

Promundo is a Global Consortium with member organizations in the United States, Brazil, Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Portugal.

Mission

Promundo works to promote gender equality and create a world free from violence by engaging men and boys in partnership with women and girls.

Vision

They envision a world where all people work to create a nonviolent, caring, and gender-equitable future for themselves and for their children.

Their Work