The Potential of a Community-Led Approach to Change Harmful Gender Norms in Low- and Middle-Income Countries

Much action to challenge discriminatory gender norms takes place at the community level. Drawing on his experience of working with the non-governmental organisation (NGO) Tostan in West Africa and literature on social norm change and community-led development, Dr. Ben Cislaghi discusses in this paper some of the challenges and opportunities that community-level action to change gender norms presents.

Dr. Cislaghi's focus is on projects that facilitate change in harmful practices in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) and that work with groups of people who are in community - that is, who share 3 characteristics: (i) imagined membership (people can see themselves as belonging to the community in ways that influence their sense of self); (ii) social interactions (people know and meet each other, have a governance system in place - or another decision-making modality such as collective meetings - to which they can contribute, and share social ties); and (iii) a shared physical context (people's lives are anchored to and influenced by a given physical space).

There is a distinction between community-based and community-led approaches. The former, which include any interventions that work with a whole community (or a representative subset), are not necessarily led by community members. A top-down child vaccination intervention, for instance, often includes practitioner-led community-level vaccination days. "Community-led approaches, on the other hand, have greater potential to increase people's self-help capacity, building on their traditional values and offering opportunities to draw from traditional, culturally grounded forms of mutual protection and assistance. Here, the role of the practitioner is to facilitate constructive, inclusive dialogue and reflection to inform community members' decisions and actions."

Dr. Cislaghi explains that community-led approaches hold that practitioners should help people sort out their problems themselves. When transformative power is in the hands of community members, community-led interventions:

• Can be very effective: community members know the socio-cultural setting where their actions will be implemented and can devise strategies that are both culturally appropriate and can leverage it as a source of solutions.
• Help people achieve goals that matter to them, drawing on their individual and collective aspirations.

Gender equality is one goal that matters to people, and it can be supported through transformation of harmful gender norms. Practitioners working at the community level can help people identify harmful norms and facilitate reflections about the extent to which those norms and practices are affecting people's health, happiness, and wellbeing.

Community-led interventions have been found to be effective in achieving greater gender equality, and Dr. Cislaghi discusses 2 examples (see also Related Summaries, below): (i) the SASA! programme in East Africa and (ii) Tostan's Community Empowerment Programme (CEP) in West Africa (see Box 2 on page 10 for some CEP results).

Dr. Cislaghi outlines in this paper a 3-step process of effective community-led programmes for transforming gender norms:

1. Motivation: Practitioners create a safe space where a community facilitator can help a relatively small group of participants (50 or so) discuss what they like and do not like about their local reality. These groups are generally homogeneous in terms of age but are of mixed gender and ethnicity. In the Tostan programme, participants met 3 times a week for 3 years. As a strategy to facilitate the discussion on existing practices, organisations can design or make use of curricula that include a critical framework for participants to uncover and name problems that matter to them. Dr. Cislaghi's preference is for the language of human rights and responsibilities (see Box 4). The first session involves asking participants to draw an image of how they would like their community to be in 20 years' time. That drawing is motivational and, throughout the sessions, becomes the anchor to which the community facilitators refer when participants discuss change. Indeed, through time, participants begin to identify and share the lived challenges and obstacles to their health and wellbeing that they experience living in their community. Very often, these challenges intersect with gender norms and roles.
2. Deliberation: Participants deliberate together on what course of action can best help them achieve the change(s) they want. It is at this point that norms among participants begin to shift: norms regarding who speaks and leads, who makes decisions, or who participates in public discussions (applying the public speaking skills they have rehearsed in the sessions).
3. Action/diffusion: Participants begin to speak differently and initiate new actions (e.g., women speaking in public, men participating in village clean-ups). Some of these changes (for instance, better communication within spousal relationships, or increasing women's voice during village meetings) might require motivating non-participating members of the community to join in the movement for change. This is where the concept of "organised diffusion" (see Box 5 on page 12, as well as Related Summaries, below) comes into play. In brief: Participants themselves reach out to others in their community, using the words and concepts that motivated them during the programme and eventually expanding the group of motivated agents of change. New positive gender norms finally emerge in the larger community; these new norms promote changes in behaviour, even though some people's attitudes might still be resistant.

There are challenges related to community-led approaches for transforming gender norms, and Dr. Cislaghi examines 2 of them, along with potential opportunities for how to overcome them:

• Harmful gender norms are potentially invisible. However:
  • Community discussions can help participants identify what educator Paulo Freire calls "limit-situations", which Dr. Cislaghi describes as "obstacles to people's collective liberation that are at the limit of people's zone of conversational comfort". As practitioners help participants investigate those limit-situations in their own lived reality, the abstract knowledge presented by the practitioners (be it about human rights, power, or gender) becomes meaningful and concrete, grounded in participants' lives. "Ideally, this process is a kind (i.e. not apportioning blame), conciliatory (i.e. avoiding accusations or recriminations) and liberating one, which cannot happen in in a short series of concise workshops."
  • Another opportunity presents itself in that, "As marginalised groups participate in collective discussions, the first obstacles they encounter might be in believing that they have something valid to say, and that others will listen to them....Participative strategies (which make use of open theatre, games, songs, and any interactive technique as long as it is adapted to suit the local cultural context) can be effective in helping participants realise their public speaking potential and experience a series of successes that would prove their prejudices towards themselves and others wrong."
• Harmful gender norms can be sustained by culturally embedded power dynamics - that is, by elders, chiefs, or spiritual leaders, for instance, who might have an interest in maintaining the gender status quo. However, harmful gender norms are subject to change, and:
  • Working with men and boys is one well-explored way to facilitate this. Dr. Cislaghi cites (and links to) much literature on the topic, such as work done by the NGO Promundo, which has produced several open-source educational resources to engage adult and young men in conversations on gender expectations that might be harmful to themselves and others, and on why they comply with these expectations. Practitioners have various points they can use to help people recognise gender equality as a collective goal, such as the fact that oppressors also suffer from the system of oppression (think, for example, of so-called "toxic masculinity", explored in the report).
  • Working with traditional and religious leaders - decision-makers - can help achieve greater reach and sustainability of change. Dr. Cislaghi cites (and links to) some resources for practitioners. For instance, Voices for Change (V4C) has written a learning report on how the organisation worked with traditional leaders in Nigeria, and the Sonke Gender Justice Network has published a paper on the importance of involving traditional leaders in gender transformation work.

Selected takeaway messages, excerpted from the report:

• Community-led gender norm change requires compassionate practitioners who facilitate honest, values-based dialogues, within and across cultures.
• Community-led approaches to development should not be culturally imperialistic (imposing external agendas and values); however, they are rarely value-neutral, as they tend to embody the values of the practitioners and/or organisations funding the activities.
• Achieving change in harmful gender norms is likely to be a slow process.

The implication of these messages is that, "If women in a given community do not want to leave the household to work, practitioners should sustain the dialogue: what does gender equality mean to them? While community-led development practitioners should trust people to have control over the outcomes of the intervention, they should also engage, through their projects, in power-aware and value-informed conversations. These conversations, if truly honest and open-minded, will require time but will be potentially transformative for both the practitioners and the people reached by their interventions."

This document is an output of Advancing Learning and Innovation on Gender Norms (ALIGN), a 4-year project aimed at establishing a digital platform for the Community of Practice (CoP) centred on gendered norms affecting adolescents and young adults.