An Ecological and Culturally Grounded Approach to Promote Adolescent Girls' Rights and Development: A Case Study from Senegal

"Numerous programs to protect and support girls focus narrowly, and sometimes exclusively, on girls, ignoring the structure and core cultural values of non-Western societies and reflecting behaviorist and linear reasoning."

In southern Senegal, adolescent girls face various gender-based norms and practices that limit their rights and full development. For 20 years, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) working in this region addressed priority global concerns such as child marriage and female genital mutilation (FGM), with limited results, except in terms of girls' school attendance. These programmes rarely addressed specific community priorities related to girls' development. Furthermore, in this socio-cultural context, where elders are influential family and community actors, virtually all past programmes adopted a linear and girl-centric approach that ignored the core values of collectivist, or relation-based, cultures. As a contrast, this paper presents a case study of Girls' Holistic Development (GHD), a Senegalese intervention that responds to calls from the Global South to decolonise development programmes through adoption of social change strategies that respect and build on extant cultural values, roles, and traditions.

In 2008, the American and Senegalese NGO, Grandmother Project - Change through Culture (GMP), initiated the GHD programme in the Kolda Region of southern Senegal to address both global and local concerns affecting girls' rights and development. (See Related Summaries, below, for more content on GHD.) It was developed through a multi-year action-research approach. Initiated in 6 villages, GHD was gradually expanded to involve more than 90 rural communities and urban neighbourhoods; the ongoing programme continues to expand geographically. GHD's approach: is culturally grounded; is intergenerational; builds on existing community assets; elicits dialogue for consensus-building for change; and strengthens community leaders' capacity to catalyse change in social norms affecting girls.

To create an enabling environment to support change for girls, GHD involves men and women of three generations (elders, adults, and adolescents), traditional and religious leaders, teachers and community health workers. GHD activities challenge community actors to revitalise core aspects of their cultural values and identity and to incorporate new norms and attitudes in favor of GHD. GHD activities both strengthen existing communication relationships (e.g., between girls and grandmothers) and create new relationships (e.g., between teachers and grandmothers). GHD's community dialogue strategy catalyses interaction to strengthen connectedness, a prerequisite for community-wide consensus-building for change. Throughout the GHD programme, participatory transformative learning methods are used, including stories-without-an-ending, open-ended role plays, and facilitated group discussions. Such group learning methods are well suited to collectivist African societies.

Based on GHD's theory of change (see Figure 1 in the paper), an operational methodology was developed that exemplifies GMP's Change through Culture approach. The methodology consists of 7 steps implemented sequentially. (In addition to the 7 steps, a cross-cutting element is the strengthening of communication relationships between all segments of the community.)

1. Establishing trusting relationships with community leaders and groups;
2. Analysing family and community systems;
3. Affirming local cultural roles and values;
4. Strengthening the knowledge and confidence of community leaders (e.g., through Grandmother Leadership Training involving under-the-tree participatory learning sessions with natural grandmother leaders to strengthen solidarity between them and their knowledge on adolescence);
5. Fostering community dialogue for consensus-building;
6. Providing ongoing support to formal and informal leaders to reinforce their capacity and commitment to support community well-being; and
7. Conducting ongoing monitoring, documentation, and learning.

Next, the paper presents the conclusions of several external evaluations and studies, using both quantitative and qualitative methods, to provide evidence of the effectiveness of GHD's strategy. In brief, GHD has been found to have contributed: to changing community norms and practices regarding girls' education, child marriage, teen pregnancy, and FGM; to modifying gender-biased attitudes negatively affecting girls; to creating local alliances of girls, mothers, and grandmothers; and to empowering grandmother leaders, thereby promoting GHD. Triangulation of the conclusions of these various evaluations and studies on the GHD strategy provides substantive evidence of changes in engrained socio-cultural norms that limit girls' development at several levels: of the community; the school; the family; and of adolescent girls themselves. Those changes are presented in Figure 3 of the paper.

As outlined here, 3 salient characteristics of GHD have contributed to strong community engagement and to community-driven support for change that may be applicable to future social change programmes elsewhere in the Global South. These key characteristics are:

• The grounding of the intervention in the local socio-cultural context - GHD illustrates a social change strategy based on an in-depth and systemic understanding of the cultural context, informed both by an initial participatory community assessment and by the cultural grounding of GHD managers and implementors. GHD's approach explicitly builds on positive roles and values that are prevalent in societies in the Global South: reciprocity; interdependence; solidarity; relational agency; the importance of adolescent-family relationships; and respect for and responsibility toward elders.
• The ecological, systemic framework that underpins the inclusive approach to promoting change - GHD promotes change in gender-based norms and practices affecting individual girls. However, reflecting an ecological perspective on change, both the units of analysis and of intervention are family and community systems, rather than girls alone. GHD's ultimate goal is to foster sustained change within those systems. GHD's ecological approach involves: (i) initiating community change processes by developing relational connectedness and by strengthening interpersonal ties; (ii) using an assets-based approach that strengthens social resources and capacity; (iii) involving and strengthening the capacity of community leaders, both formal and informal, of all generations and genders, and of religious leaders; (iv) involving community power holders, which includes elders in African societies (specifically, grandmothers); (v) creating communication networks across genders as a foundation for social change; (vi) strengthening communication networks between women; and (vii) addressing community priorities along with global ones.
• The participatory and empowering methods used to promote consensus-building for collective change - The GHD carefully-designed participatory learning activities embody those characteristics: reflection on individual experience as the starting point for all learning; collective critical reflection on both past experience and new ideas; dialogue for consensus-building within both existing and new communication relationships; holistic learning experiences that involve different ways of knowing including cognitive, affective, and spiritual; learning experiences reflective of the local context, especially the cultural context, which is collective and hierarchical in African societies; and the creation of authentic relationships between facilitators and learners, and also between learners.

In conclusion: "Development sector scholars and program designers in the Global North often overlook the contrasting structure, values, and other contextual features of non-western cultures in the Global South. This limits their ability to develop interventions that are culturally grounded and, therefore, more relevant to communities and more likely to lead to positive outcomes. The decolonization of development practice requires increased dialogue between Global North and Global South scholars and practitioners that considers cultural specificities, including gender dynamics, within family and community systems in African societies, and across the non-western world."