Empowerment – C4D Network

This report draws on 44 real-life examples and 168 research papers from 10 fields to develop 7 general principles that seem to underlie information initiatives that successfully empower people. Principles 1, 2, and 3 speak to how information empowers through reinterpretation, and Principles 4
to 7 speak to how we can support that reinterpretation—and get people to act.

The goal of this report is to illustrate that information does not empower on its own. Rather, the act of reinterpreting information is empowering, and that act is driven by social and emotional factors. From the literature summarized in this report, we extrapolate principles by which the reinterpretation of information leads to empowerment.

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The process of understanding nutrition related problems, and of developing appropriate solutions – i.e., design thinking – can be quite challenging. In fact, there are far more examples of public health solutions that ignore the end-user than of ones that are built with the end-user in mind. For this very reason, the goal of this chapter is to convey the relevance of people-centered design to nutrition interventions, and to share some strategies for putting people at the heart of nutrition interventions.

The chapter uses case studies to consider the role of participatory photography, and grandmothers and indigenous knowledge systems in nutrition interventions.

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