Gender Violence Recovery Centre

Seeks to ensure quality and comprehensive treat­ment, recov­ery, reha­bil­i­ta­tion, and rein­te­gra­tion of sur­vivors of sexual and gender-based violence.

GVRC is com­mit­ted towards demand-driven service delivery and thus seeks to ensure quality and comprehensive treat­ment, recov­ery, reha­bil­i­ta­tion and rein­te­gra­tion of all sur­vivors. Over­all since its incep­tion in March 2001, the cen­tre has pro­vided free and com­pre­hen­sive med­ical treat­ment and psy­choso­cial sup­port to over 55,000 survivors. Until very recently GVRC was the only cen­tre that pro­vided FREE med­ical and psy­choso­cial sup­port to sur­vivors of gen­der based vio­lence in East and Cen­tral Africa. GVRC is one of the pio­neer cen­tres that devel­oped a com­put­er­ized data man­age­ment sys­tem on GBV in Kenya. The sta­tis­tics have also been used to influ­ence key national ini­tia­tives includ­ing the enact­ment of the Sex­ual Offenses Act 2006, estab­lish­ment of the other recov­ery cen­tres and the deci­sion by the com­mis­sion of inquiry into the post elec­tion vio­lence (Waki Com­mis­sion). Cour­tesy of Recover, GVRC has pre­served evi­dence and infor­ma­tion cru­cial to bring­ing those respon­si­ble for the vio­lent acts to justice. GVRC has also trained police offi­cers coun­try­wide to man­age gen­der friendly desks at their assigned police sta­tions, in order to enhance han­dling of cases. GVRC in col­lab­o­ra­tion with the Nurs­ing Coun­cil of Kenya has now introduced GBV pro­to­cols which have now been incor­po­rated into the Bach­e­lor of Sci­ence – Nurs­ing degree cur­ricu­lum. This enables nurses, who are the first point of con­tact in most cases to man­age sur­vivors of GBV effi­ciently; by enabling them to have a bet­ter under­stand­ing of gen­der and its rela­tion­ship to health in order to man­age gen­der related health problems. Through its best prac­tices, GVRC has mod­eled a one-stop cen­tre and has built capac­i­ties of ser­vice providers in dif­fer­ent regions. This has enabled them to make man­age­ment of GBV timely, acces­si­ble and com­pre­hen­sive. Such cen­tres include Cen­tre for Assault and Recov­ery in Eldoret (CARE) sit­u­ated at the Moi Teach­ing and Refer­ral Cen­tre, the Coast gen­eral hos­pi­tal recov­ery cen­tre, Gen­der Based Vio­lence Recov­ery Cen­tre (GBVRC) at the Keny­atta National Hos­pi­tal, Taita Taveta Dis­trict hos­pi­tal, Biafra Clinic in East­leigh Nairobi, Jinja dis­trict hos­pi­tal and Mlago hos­pi­tal in Kam­pala Uganda. GVRC remains a refer­ral cen­tre for spe­cial­ized man­age­ment of GBV cases from all over Kenya. For Instance, the Kenya Red Cross has been a key part­ner in assist­ing sur­vivors from the hard to reach areas unreached by GVRC. GVRC sim­i­larly remains the cen­tre that dif­fer­ent GBV ser­vice providers, look up to in terms of capac­ity build­ing and wealth of expe­ri­ence.