Women's Empowerment
Transform Africa is fully aware that culture, religion and politics play a significant role in disempowering women, especially in rural communities. Their voices are often less heard - especially when it comes to decision making. Our approach to women's empowerment actively involving women in project planning and management process. For example when developing an application for funding a community initiative, we use interviews and focus group discussions where groups bringing together both genders (older men, young men, older women young women) give inputs. These processes, in addition to equal representation of men and women on stakeholder reference committees, are stringent measures to ensure that women's voices are heard.
In Ghana and Nigeria, we are adopting women's empowerment processes to help communities fight the spread of HIV through addressing women's rights. Working in partnership with ISODEC (Integrated Social Development Centre); CEDEP (Centre for the Development of People) in Ghana and CDRT (Centre for Democratic Training and Research) and Intellfit, we identified Northern Ghana and Northern Nigeria as two regions where women are most marginalised and disempowered. We embarked on a joint initiative to create a strong enabling environment for the actualisation of women’s rights in the two regions. We are seeking to tangibly improve women’s positions in their communities through transforming the attitudes, perceptions and behaviours of men and women in rural/semi-rural areas. A joint funding application was submitted to DFID in 2006 to support this initiative.
We are undertaking similar processes and initiatives in Sierra Leone, Tanzania and Zambia where we have complemented behavioural change processes with prioritising poor women for community-based revolving fund loans. Such support has proved to be a great success in reducing vulnerability to sexual exploitation and improving household incomes.
