Seven-year, £67.5m initiative aims to build on existing successes in Africa and Asia and explore new approaches

Britain has become the biggest government funder of programmes to prevent violence against women and girls globally after launching a seven-year project targeting countries with some of the highest levels of abuse.

The £67.5m programme will scale up projects that have already shown success in reducing violence across Africa and Asia, and will pilot and research new ideas to tackle the global crisis.

According to the World Health Organization, one in three women worldwide will experience physical and/or sexual violence in their lifetime, mostly from an intimate partner.

But this global figure masks regional and national disparities. A survey conducted in Zambia showed that 64% of women said they had been sexually assaulted by their partner and 33% had been kicked, dragged, choked or burned. In South Sudan, a country experiencing a protracted humanitarian crisis, as many as 70% of women and girls who had been in a relationship said they had experienced some form of violence.

Launched by the Department for International Development (DfID) on Saturday, the programme – What Works to Prevent Violence: Impact at Scale – builds on a previous initiative, launched in 2014, that gathered evidence about the scale and impact of violence against women and girls, and ways to stop it.

'It's a miracle': the scheme ending abuse against women in Tajikistan Read more

The £25m programme supported 13 small-scale projects in Africa and Asia – ranging from couples’ counselling in Rwanda, to introducing school play time in Pakistan – as well as research into the drivers, prevalence, and social and economic costs of violence.

Before the scheme, there was little evidence internationally on how to tackle violence in poorer countries.

A number of these pilot programmes helped to halve levels of physical and sexual violence in less than two years.

In Tajikistan, visited by the Guardian last year, levels of violence against women in two regions fell from 64% to 34% following 10 weeks of counselling, skills training and mentoring. The percentage of men who said they were violent fell from 47% to 5%.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Women in Tajikistan involved in a workshop project that aims to tackle domestic violence. Photograph: Anisa Sabiri/The Guardian

Suicide rates among women in these regions fell from 20% before the project to 9% after, and for men, rates fell from from 10% to nil. Women’s earnings increased. Fifteen months after the project ended, the successful gains were still evident.

Meanwhile, a project in the Democratic Republic of the Congo that trained faith leaders to challenge abuse in their sermons reduced domestic violence by nearly 60% in 15 villages over two years.

“Violence against women and girls affects communities around the world and one in every three women will experience it in their lifetime. It is an issue we must continue to tackle in both developing and developed countries,” said the international development secretary, Alok Sharma.

“However, for women and girls living in extreme poverty the threat is even higher. Failure to address this issue is not an option and doing nothing condemns future generations to repeat this cycle of violence.”

More than £33m of the new funding will be spent on expanding these successful projects, and adjusting and testing them in new locations. Another £10m will be used to design and pilot new ideas and programmes, particularly to research how violence can be tackled in times of conflict and during humanitarian crises, where levels of domestic violence increase.

DfID also wants to pilot programmes that specifically target violence against adolescent girls and among people with disabilities, and address violence against children to stop it being passed down through generations.

DfID will target countries in Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, north Africa and the Middle East.

The department hopes the success of What Works will spur other donors to fund similar programmes that aim to prevent violence.

Charlotte Watts, DfID’s chief scientific adviser, said: “People think it’s going to take generations, but what’s so powerful about What Works is that it is not only showing we are preventing violence, but that these impacts are being achieved over two to three years. Strong evidence gives us the tools to argue the importance of investing in prevention.”

UN member states have committed to eliminate all forms of violence against women and girls by 2030, a hugely ambitious target of the sustainable development goals.

But Watts maintains: “We are generating evidence that will clearly contribute to how we get there [to SDG target]. We are seeing declines in violence in some contexts. It will be country by country … Wherever we are by then [2030], we will be generating evidence to help us get further.

“We want to get to zero [levels of violence] … this will really help us get there.”