The primary focus of this year's 16 Days of Activism Campaign was to promote local actions to end gender based violence (GBV). GL worked with local councils and communities that are part of the GL Centres of Excellence for Gender Mainstreaming in Local Government.

GL is working with 100 councils in 10 countries including Botswana, Lesotho, Madagascar, Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, Swaziland, Zambia and Zimbabwe.

GL local government facilitators worked with local councils to develop a 16 Days plan including cyber dialogues or online discussions. The planning was accompanied by IT training to ensure that the councils and community members will be able to participate in the cyber dialogues.

A complimentary focus was to work with the media to expand and improve the coverage of GBV. In the 2010 Gender and Media Progress Study GL found that only 4% of media coverage in a month of monitoring was on GBV out of a sample of over 30000 news items from 14 countries. Only 27% of the sources in these stories were women. Men spoke more on all aspects of GBV including rape (75%) and domestic violence (76%).