Global community of professionals working in Communication for Development
This guide is an intensive curriculum aimed at engaging girls and their allies in strategic advocacy to improve girls’ lives around the world. The approach is an integrated emphasis on social justice values, a human rights framework, and a gender-focused perspective.
The guide offers an introduction to advocacy; advocacy for and with girls, and self-Care and Safety for Advocates, amongst other topics.
Click here for full guide.
A multi-year, multi-country study has been exploring the complex ways in which adolescent girls’ capabilities are shaped and/or constrained by gender-discriminatory social norms, attitudes and practices, and under what conditions positive changes may be brought about, particularly around norms and practices related to child marriage and education.
Evidence from this report showed that communications programmes could be an effective way of challenging gender-discriminatory attitudes and practices, reaching a variety of stakeholders with both broad pro-gender equality messages and messages on specific discriminatory norms. While no one approach was found to be more effective than others, programmes with more than one communications component and those integrated with activities other than communications were found to achieve a higher proportion of positive outcomes.
The study has been conducted by ODI in partnership with national research teams in Viet Nam, Nepal, Ethiopia and Uganda, commissioned by the UK Department for International Development (DFID) as part of a flagship programme on Transforming the Lives of Girls and Young Women.
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Safer cities strive to create public spaces that are open and accessible to everyone, without exception. Most cities, however, are not totally safe for
adolescent girls. What’s more, they are run and developed predominantly without their needs being taken into account. Each week 1 million people
move from the countryside to city slums, of which a growing number of migrants are girls, and there is growing pressure to find ways to address the myriad of dangers girls face, from violence and exploitation to discrimination and access to schooling and safe housing.
Communication for Development (C4D) has emerged as an important addition to those promoting the rights of girls in the city. Programmes based on C4D take into account the fact that, as experts in their own safety and use of the city, girls are best positioned to identify the issues and priorities
that affect them today and in the future, in order to make cities safer and more inclusive. In short, C4D gives adolescent girls a voice with which to take an active role in the development of safe urban environments.
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This event will be live-streamed at: https://livestream.com/internetsociety/aswgt2018
Over 250 of Africa’s leading technology innovators will gather October 9-11 in Accra, Ghana for the second Africa Summit on Women and Girls in Technology. The Summit — which comes at a crucial point in time when the world is set to reach 50% connectivity — aims to design solutions that will enable millions of African women and girls to benefit from access to technology and use their skills to build a better Africa for all.
Bridging the digital gender gap is a critical step toward the vision of a thriving Africa — yet research has shown that women in some communities are up to 50% less likely than men to be online. In Africa, where nearly 75% of the population remains offline, this problem is particularly acute. The Summit will explore a range of relevant topic areas, with a focus on developing policy to advance:
● Access to affordable broadband
● Women’s rights online
● Digital education and skills
● Digital entrepreneurship
The 2018 Africa Summit on Women and Girls in Technology is a collaboration between the World Wide Web Foundation, Alliance for Affordable Internet (A4AI), Ghana Ministry of Communications, African Development Bank, Open Society Initiative for West Africa, Internet Society, Facebook, Federal Ministry of Economic Cooperation and Development (Germany), Google, Swedish International Development Agency and UN Women.
This report initially reviews the landscape of theory around social norms (“Theory”). It then investigates two projects that have facilitated change around norms and practices of female genital cutting (FGC) and child marriage: Tostan’s Community Empowerment Program (CEP) in West Africa and Population Council’s Abriendo Oportunidades (“Opening Opportunities”; AO) project in Latin America (“Practice”).
The report concludes by discussing the implications of both theory and practice for the future of social norms change (“The Way Forward”).
Click here for full report.