Shifting the Focus
Re-centering the societal narrative from the perpetrator to the victim and the prevention.
Right now
Our intellectual and civic engine
Shifting the Focus is currently how Unseen Minority challenges Zambia’s reactive culture: high-level webinars, publications, and advocacy that centres victims and prevention, not the perpetrator.
Where legal processes track the accused and media coverage follows the offender, our work puts the survivor’s experience and the systems that could have prevented harm at the centre of the conversation instead.
The problem
A system architected around the perpetrator
Zambia’s advocacy ecosystem, across gender-based violence, crime, and community vulnerability, is structured around the perpetrator. Legal processes track the accused. Media coverage follows the offender. The survivor is referred once, and then lost from the record.
Shifting the Focus exists to correct that asymmetry: to make the survivor’s outcome, not the perpetrator’s process, the unit of account.
Where we're heading
Our two-year goal: a four-stage, wrap-around case model
Advocacy is where Shifting the Focus starts, not where it ends. Over the next two years, we aim to grow the programme into direct case support: a victim-centred model that wraps around, and does not replace, existing legal and social services. The target design moves every case through four stages:
Intake & Immediate Stabilisation
Structured intake within 24–72 hours of contact. Urgent needs, including safety, shelter, and medical, identified within 48 hours.
Resource Mapping & Referral
Active referrals to legal, medical, and social services, with follow-through tracking. A referral made is not a case closed.
Outcome Tracking
A defined 90-day tracked window, measured against housing, income, legal, and psychosocial metrics for every case.
Case Closure & Handoff
Cases close only when outcomes are achieved, never by default, never by lapse of attention.
Why this design
A referral would be the beginning, not the end
In most systems, a referral is where the record ends. Under this model, it would be where the intervention begins: every referral tracked to follow-through, and every case measured against defined outcomes across an enforced 90-day window.
No comparable Lusaka programme currently runs a defined, enforced 90-day outcome-tracking period. That window, and the discipline of closing cases only on achieved outcomes, would be the programme’s core contribution once launched.
Target pilot scope · Year 2
A bounded pilot, run with established institutions
- Caseload
- 25 cases per cycle
- Beneficiary target
- 70% female beneficiaries
- Prospective institutional partners
- Legal Aid Board Zambia, WLSA, Zambia Police Victim Support Unit, YWCA Zambia
- Safeguarding
- No case details or identifying information will ever be published. Reporting would be aggregate and outcome-based.
Help us grow from advocacy to case support
We are seeking partners for our current webinars, publications, and advocacy work, and for institutions who want to help design the case-support model ahead of its first pilot cycle.