Bringing an idea or movement to transformative scale is a complex task, especially in a world where the challenges we face often seem insurmountable. It requires innovation, partnership, and planning, as well as much patience. But since founding Tostan (an African community empowerment NGO) in 1991, I have found that something called responsive listening is actually the most essential element of helping a grassroots movement grow. For us, responsive listening has shaped not only what we do, but also how we fund it.
Responsive listening is about really understanding people and working alongside rather than for them. These behaviors are foundational for Tostan and a catalyst for all innovations to our programs and approach. Listening attentively to the needs of our partner communities and directly incorporating their feedback has constantly refined the way we work. One change at a time, we have built an approach that organically brings movements to scale, because the communities with which we partner essentially design and lead them.
Today, the heart of our approach to this work is our Community Empowerment Program (CEP), a three-year, non-formal education program with three main elements:
It is human rights-centered. During the first months of our program, community members learn about their human rights. Participants start a dialogue about what these rights mean to them and explore how their existing traditions, values, and religious beliefs support these rights. Likewise, knowledge of their human rights gives them a foundation to question practices or social norms that violate these rights. Learning about human rights has proved powerful, especially for women, giving them new confidence to speak out about issues such as child marriage, female genital cutting, and domestic violence, and to participate in family and community decisions.
It is holistic and integrated. The communities we partner with in Africa are dynamic, and work to address a broad range of challenges and experiences. We have found that education functions best in the same way: When holistic and integrated, it prepares participants to find appropriate solutions to the many issues their communities face. Our program has evolved to mirror this need, facilitating learning on topics such as human rights, problem solving, hygiene and health, literacy, numeracy, and project management. In this way, issues intersect and reinforce one another—for example when communities apply new skills to build a school or address a health issue.
It is inclusive of networks. When it comes to building support for a movement, it is imperative to include the extended family or social network. This is something I learned from my dear friend Demba Diawara, a village imam (leader) and social change activist in Senegal. He told me: "A person's family is not their village. The family includes one's entire social network. ... If you truly want to bring about widespread change, they must all be involved.” In other words, neighboring villages, relatives living far away, and all others connected to a given community must engage in the conversation.
A process called organized diffusion helps achieve this broad engagement. First, all members of an individual village or community must connect to the learning process. Our CEP classes include a diverse range of community members—women, men, and adolescents—from different social strata in the village. These participants learn and talk together during class sessions, and commit to sharing the information they gain with their family and community. Second, CEP is not a village-at-a-time model. Instead, we work in clusters of 30-50 communities within a region. That way, the dialogue expands even farther, as entire communities host social mobilization activities and inter-village meetings to discuss information relevant to their extended network—notably, that includes people not participating in our full program and even communities living across borders in other countries. Through this outreach process, entire social networks become engaged, taking ideas and turning them into action for change.
These hallmarks of our approach—human rights-centered, holistic, and inclusive of community networks—are the result of responsive listening, and they are what help empower and mobilize communities to identify and grow their movements for change. Although the cultural contexts and exact needs of communities vary, the same principle applies: We are working with communities to design an approach that can scale and sustain itself.
The practice of reflective learning has also influenced how we fund this work. Our financial support has traditionally taken the form of stand-alone projects lasting one or two years and focused mostly on single issues—a typical funding pattern for many NGOs. We deeply appreciate these partnerships. But as we looked at reaching thousands more villages across West Africa, we realized that we needed something more—multi-issue, multi-year, multi-country support to really follow what we’ve learned and allow our programs to scale up in step with communities’ ambitions.
Launched last year, our Generational Change in Three Years campaign creates that new, holistic funding model by coordinating our work in 1,000 communities and six countries around three goals: 1) ending female genital cutting in Senegal and reducing it in surrounding countries, 2) greatly reducing child marriage and violence against women and girls, and 3) transforming education for a generation of parents and children. The “pooled” funding model of this campaign will allow us to deliver results more efficiently—by reducing administrative costs, streamlining reporting protocols, and ensuring secure cash-flow. In April we launched the first wave of this new effort, starting activities in 150 communities in Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Mali, and Mauritania.
We have found that CEP is adaptable to almost every community and context, and works most powerfully when deployed at scale. Thus, continuing to run the model as best we could through uncoordinated projects would have embodied unresponsive listening. As we say in Senegal, “When the rhythm changes, so must the dance.” We are excited by where our latest campaign and other innovations can take us, and most importantly, how these innovations can propel the ambitious efforts of our partner communities to build bright futures.
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Read more stories by Molly Melching.