- Any coordination efforts should seek to establish some common understanding so that all action-planning, advocacy, training, fieldwork—and any other activities undertaken by GBV coordinating partners—is consistent in terminology, theory and practice.
- It is easy to take for granted that everyone working to end violence against women has the same core understanding of definitions, principles and programming models related to GBV. However, partners often discover well into a coordination process that there are widely divergent views on even the most fundamental theoretical and practical issues. In such cases, misunderstandings are likely to emerge over time, leading to compromised coordination efforts, but also—and even more critically—to unsafe or unethical programming. Similarly, GBV partners might have a different understanding of how sexual violence is defined, creating challenges in communication as well as in data collection and analysis.