The Tackling Paramilitarism, and Organised Crime Programme works across Northern Ireland to support people and communities at various level of risk and with varying levels of need. Recognising the systemic impact of violence and paramilitarism across a range of outcomes, initiatives are delivered collaboratively by government departments, statutory agencies and partners in the voluntary and community sector. The Programme is an ambitious, multi-disciplinary and transformational change programme working to deliver the NI Executive’s priority of addressing the challenging issues associated with paramilitarism and higher-harm violence in Northern Ireland. The overall aim of the Programme is to achieve safer communities, resilient to paramilitarism, criminality and coercive control. The pilot programme In 2021, the Department for Communities (DfC) supported by EPPOC launched a pilot programme to support women in communities most affected by conflict and known to have experienced the enduring effects of violence and underinvestment from a range of empirical and administrative data. It is within these areas that paramilitary activity, poor mental health, rates of unemployment and educational underachievement remain elevated and that were targeted by the pilot.

The overarching aims of the programme were to provide women living in these areas with the skills, knowledge and confidence to affect change in their local areas and to take on leadership roles in their local communities. Key to the pilot was providing local community organisations operating within these areas with access to resources and support to design contextual and culturally relevant projects and use those to build sustainable capacity. Applicants were invited to consider the specific needs of women in their local community and consider including a range of thematic modules that focused on:

• Confidence and self esteem
• Communication skills
• Personal development
• Teamwork and collaboration
• Self-awareness
• Roles of women within the family/community
• Problem solving
• Leadership

The pilot was delivered across fourteen areas during 2021/22, reaching more than two hundred women. A highly positive evaluation was published by Queens University Belfast (Walsh, 2022), with recommendations for further refinement. These observations were welcomed by the project Advisory Board in June 2022 (DfC, 2022) and recommendations embedded into the design of an extension to the pilot.

The overall aim of the evaluation is to assess the programme’s contribution to the wider Executive Programme on Paramilitarism, and Organised Crime.