CAPs Friday 29/1/10

Friday, 29 January 2010 | posted by Sara_BC

Mesert from Ethiopia speaks to you about her CAP: Empowerment for Equality

January 27, 2010

Hi Global Changemakers and coordinators of the team.

It is my pleasure to update you on my community action project. Thanks to the Cape Town Africa Youth Summit 2009, I was privileged to implement my project on gender-based violence in my community with the support of the British Council.

The main reason why I wanted to design and implement gender-based violence CAP was because gender-based violence and harmful tradition practices are among the major factors that hinder the political and social participation of girls, especially in rural areas of the country.

Four rural schools were targeted within the project and gender clubs were established. Girls who were actively participating in other extra curricula activities were selected to lead clubs in their respective schools. The next step was giving training to these girls about the concepts of gender-based violence, harmful traditional practices and club management concepts. This training was given by experts in the field.

Peer education, educational concerts, panel discussions, question and answer contests and distribution of education materials are instruments we have been using to bring the desired change to our community.

Once the training was given and the clubs were formed, all trainees formed their peer groups among their respective close friends to reach more girls. The project reached all family members of the students who participated in the project because all students were supported and encouraged to initiate discussions at their respective homes using any opportunity to talk about the issues they learned in the schools.

Collaboration between gender clubs, school principals and local administrators was one of the factors that contributed a lot for the effective implementation and mass involvement of the project. This was achieved because we consulted the school principals and local administrators at the design stage of the project.

We have ensured support for the clubs from these stakeholders for even after the termination of this project and this will enhance the project’s sustainability. The question and answer contests we organized in schools were popular because of its approach. The questions raised were new to most participants and the winners of the contests received prizes. For these reasons, a large number of students attended the contests taking advantaged of the opportunity. The gender club leaders were even able to deliver gender-related information and recruit students to join the clubs.

We  involved not only girls in the project, but also boys because we have the strong belief that bringing social justice can only be achieved when both, women and men, can participate actively and equally in the discussion. This was the crucial point for our success and we were able to expand our project’s impact to a family level.

We evaluate our progresses and difficulties based on pre-scheduled programs to assess the status of the project. Additionally, all stakeholders that took part in the implementation participated in the evaluation meetings.

 We will expand our intervention during the coming months to reach more students in schools and more community members in the project area. We hope we will empower more illiterate women and girls who are suffering much from gender-based violence and harmful traditional practices in our community.

This is the first project of this type in the project area and the results are encouraging. We will try to do better than what we already have during the upcoming time by learning from our past experiences.

Thank you for you attention and feel free to ask me more questions or to send your comments to .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).

Meseret.