Abstract
Journal of Communication. 2011; 61: 197-218.African Transformation (AT) is a community development program informed by James Carey's notion of ritual communication and Paulo Freire's theory of critical pedagogy. AT features video portraits of ordinary people in Tanzania, Uganda, and Zambia who have overcome gender-based obstacles to better their lives. In Uganda, women and men gathered to interrogate common beliefs and explore actions they could take in light of the real-life stories portrayed in the videos. We hypothesized that individuals who participated in the program would be more likely than nonparticipants to express high levels of self-efficacy, espouse equitable gender norms, and report high levels of agency. Multivariate regression analysis, controlling for socioeconomic characteristics, confirmed that hypothesis.
Empirical evidence demonstrates that inequitable gender constructs have detrimental consequences that are both personal and political. These consequences can limit the life chances of men and women, affect communities, and reverberate in the public and private spheres. Inequitable gender norms impair the health of women, men, and children (Kawachi, Kennedy, Gupta, & Prothrow-Stith, 1999), restrain economic growth (Beneria & Feldman, 1992; Boserup, 1970), hinder poverty reduction (Beneria, 1995), limit girls' access to schooling (Klassen, 2002), contribute to ongoing violence against women (Heise, Ellsberg, & Gottemoeller, 1999), and inhibit the evolution of civil society (World Bank, 1994:7). Inequitable gender norms have also contributed to the feminization of HIV/AIDS (Campbell & MacPhail, 2002; Rao Gupta, 2002; Quinn & Overbaugh, 2005), a well-established and troubling fact in sub-Saharan Africa where in 2006, females constituted 61% of people infected with HIV-1 (UNAIDS & WHO, 2007).
The role of gender norms in HIV/AIDS transmission as well as in other arenas of everyday life has brought gender to the forefront of many social and economic development discussions. As is true of social norms in general, gender norms are not static but emerge out of communication within and between social groups and, both directly and indirectly, influence life chances by setting forth beliefs and values that justify different, often discriminatory, treatment based on gender. Although sex is biologically determined, gender is formed by social, cultural, and economic factors over time and space. Because gender, or the social differentiation between men and women, is temporally and culturally constructed, it is transmutable. Yet, gender norms are deeply rooted in any given society and, therefore, are typically resistant to change. The recognition that gender constructs often limit individual agency and can lead to harmful outcomes among men and women alike together with the understanding that changes in gender norms will be appropriate and sustainable only if constructed or reconstructed through a participatory process prompted the development of the African Transformation (AT) project. Thus, the programmatic goals are to encourage culturally appropriate gender reconstructions and to strengthen participants' agency or propensity to take action.
This article sets forth the conceptual framework that guided the development of this participatory communication program, describes the program, and presents the findings from an evaluation of the program.
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