Panzi and Make Music Matter’s Healing in Harmony project is pioneering the use of music therapy for survivors of sexual violence in conflict settings. Despite very positive results in humanitarian settings in DRC, using music-making as therapy was often dismissed as a gimmick. It was hard for the innovators to quantify their impact in ways that funders found credible.

To address this obstacle to scaling it became imperative to find a robust way to quantify the relationship between their form of music therapy and objective medical outcomes. Randomised control trials (RCTs) were used and the results proved that the music therapy delivered better results than any other form of therapy offered in these areas, including CBT.

A step-wedge design was put in place to carry out RCT every three months as a new cohort of women join the programme, with follow-up trials every three months thereafter. Panzi were able to use this systematic and robust research to evidence the impact of their work and to secure financial support that led to a substantial acceleration to scale.