ENGAGE: Women's Empowerment and Active Citizenship

This project seeks to enhance the empowerment and the active citizenship of women and girls in Bangladesh Ethiopia Haiti India and Tanzania. The project works to advance gender equality and poverty reduction by enhancing women’s capacity to participate in the social and economic life of their communities. The project applies an asset-based citizen-led development approach to ensure that local communities particularly women exercise ownership and control over social and economic development initiatives that respond to their realities and priorities. The project is implemented by the Coady Institute in collaboration with five local partners. These partners are: Self Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) in India; Organization for Women in Self Employment (WISE) in Ethiopia; Gender Training Institute (GTI) of the Tanzania Gender Networking Programme (TGNP); Christian Commission for Development (CCDB) in Bangladesh; and Centre Haïtien du Leadership et de l’Excellence (CLE) in Haiti. Each partner implements a set of asset-based community initiatives in its respective country that engage current and prospective women leaders (and male champions) in advancing gender equality locally. Partners and their networks engage a cohort of nearly 1 500 women and their allies including many from marginalized groups such as ethnic minorities persons living with disabilities and those facing extreme poverty. These leaders participate in in-country leadership courses and training-of-trainers facilitated locally by the partner organizations and Coady. They in turn will engage an estimated 25 000 local community members in skills-training advocacy and awareness activities and work with governance structures to reach women and men in advancing gender equitable community-driven change. Community-level interventions include: livelihood improvements climate change responses local accountability initiatives engaging duty-bearers and community awareness related to issues of gend

The expected outcomes for this project include: (1) strengthened leadership of women and men for gender equitable community-driven change processes in their communities in the five target countries; (2) enhanced performance of civil society organizations (particularly women’s rights organizations) in supporting women’s leadership in the five target countries; and (3) improved and increased use of gender equitable community-driven policies and practices within and beyond the five target countries.