MenEngage Alliance joins ALL IN: Global leaders for ending gender-based violence

Gender based violence remains the most widespread and devastating human rights issue in the world. Despite decades of work and understanding on eliminating and preventing it, progress has been slow and uneven. Launched in December 2025, ALL IN: Global Leaders for Ending Gender-Based Violence aims to ignite major progress on the issue by catalysing and securing the political will and commitments, leadership, and funding to end and prevent GBV within our lifetimes.

ALL IN recognizes that GBV remains a crisis not because of a lack of understanding of how to end it, but because of a lack of political will, funding, and decisive actions. The initiative collectively aims to break through these barriers by bringing together a coalition of global leaders to mobilize high-level political commitment to accelerate the progress and bring actors together around the urgency of ending all GBV to achieve social, economic, and environmental progress.

The ALL IN initiative was launched at an energetic event in London on 2^nd December 2025, bringing together high-level politicians, feminist leaders and activists, sports personalities, governments, and donors.

MenEngage Alliance is pleased to support and be part of the ALL IN initiative, which we see as integral to our core commitment and accountability to add value to the agenda of women’s rights and gender justice. As a principle-based international network, we collectively aim to strengthen gender-transformative work with men and boys for women’s rights, LGBTQIA+ rights, and gender justice for all, through dismantling stereotypes of what it means to be a man globally. Members of MenEngage Alliance, inclusive of over 1000 members from different contexts and expertise across 92 countries around the world, work individually and collectively to end and prevent gender-based violence and other forms of gender injustice at the roots. 

Co-Director of the MenEngage Alliance Global Secretariat, laxman belbase, is part of the Expert Advisory Group for ALL IN. The Expert Advisory Group also includes MenEngage members: Equimundo Centre for Masculinities and Social Justice, represented by CEO and Founder Gary Barker; The Sexual Violence Research Initiative (SVRI), represented by Executive Director Elizabeth Dartnall; and Beyond Equality, represented by Director of Facilitation Ben Hurst.

The Expert Advisory Group provides strategic guidance to the initiative and ensures its approach is informed by evidence, human rights principles, and the voices of frontline activists. Through our involvement, MenEngage Alliance is committed to supporting and contributing to the initiative’s vision, which includes calling men and boys in, including male global leaders, as a key part of the solution to gender-based violence.

Discussing the initiative, laxman belbase said:

“The crisis of gender-based violence demands that we move beyond seeing it only as a ​‘women’s issue.’ It is a societal issue where men and boys have critical roles and responsibilities.”

Men and boys constitute the majority of perpetrators, while patriarchal notions of manhood both online and offline socialise them to be domineering, controlling, and even violent. This is a critical piece to address to tackle the root causes of gender-based violence, and all discrimination against women, girls, and LGBTQI+ individuals. This entails that this work aims to dismantle discriminatory norms that tolerate, justify and encourage GBV/VAW and transform patriarchal masculinities as part of solution at all levels of society. Progress against GBV depends on actively engaging men and boys to transform these harmful norms and become positive and accountable agents of change.’

The ALL IN initiative comes as MenEngage Alliance looks ahead to its 2026 plan exploring how to engage men in positions of political power through a strategic consultation with the field of practice. 

MenEngage Alliance looks forward to collaborating with ALL IN partners to drive forward the necessary political momentum and resources needed to make the promise of a violence-free world a reality.