Empowerment of Women - Development Through Radio (DTR) Radio Listening Clubs, Zambia: Impact Evaluation Report

Objective 2: Empowerment of women

Personally and at home

“We have been empowered; we feel this very strongly. …Gender balance has been a problem for a long long time. Since the project, women discuss such issues and try to bring about gender balance especially in the home.” Many club members said their husbands were encouraging the clubs, starting within their own homes. The club members are proud of the fact that they are listened to all over the country, and that senior officials and politicians respond to their programmes on the radio: this confirms for them that the issues they discuss are important and universal.

The confidence they have gained in thinking and speaking enables club members to participate more actively in other fora such as Parent-Teacher Asssociations and church meetings, taking more of leadership roles. Those who were already in the habit of preaching now say they feel more confident in doing it: “Right now I feel that if there is a crowd I will be able to stand and articulate issues which would surprise even myself.”

It is not just speaking on the radio that the club members feel is valuable but the whole process leading up to it, discussing and preparing their presentation. They are in no doubt that during the project period their skill at thinking through and presenting issues has improved. “When we meet people who listen to our programmes, they congratulate us on how we present them. We feel we have advanced in that way.” The clubs' president feels that the whole discipline of weekly discussion meetings has been beneficial. “In the past women used to just go for beer-drinking, but now we make them busy, preparing what we are going to discuss next week. ‘On Monday we are wanted, what are we going to discuss?'“

Her club, with a higher number of educated members than most, and particularly respected for its presentation of issues, spends three or more weekly meetings discussing a single topic. On condoms, for example, “We said how good it is to use condoms, how bad it is… we even came to traditional manners, how people were doing such and such and were living alright, now these days we have AIDS because of using condoms…we have different views, so we collected them together to make a tape. We looked at both sides, the old people and how they looked after their children, and young girls these days. The inheritance law also took a long time, because we asked other people who are not members of the clubs, how they looked at it. Up to now we are still talking about it. This discussion won't end early. Where we walk we are still collecting something, some news about it. I don't know what the government is going to do...“

A very different club, in one of the less accessible villages and with less education among its members, has 39 or more members participating in discussions. Despite this large number, they say they are able to get input from each and every member and reach agreement at the end of the session. This club pays careful attention to the programmes made by other clubs, analyses their own position or situation on the issue and tries to see how the lessons may apply to their own community.

Improved power of women in project communities

The list of topics covered in programmes indicates the extent to which the Clubs have a sense of their capacity to address problems and issues for their whole communities, and indeed for women in general.

This list is incomplete, because records have not been kept. The list was compiled from fragmentary records and from conversations with club and community members.

For many community members, hearing the women discussing issues seriously on the radio has given them a new sense of women's capacities. An elderly male councillor singled out one club in particular: “We appreciate the fact that some men are very argumentative and not intelligent, but there are some women who think even better than men, and they can come up with ideas that are brilliant. I single out the Mununga group, they have been doing fantastic work and when they speak about issues they come out very very strongly, and that makes the people of this area very proud.” Another man said that previously there was a lot of suppression of women's voices, but now they appreciate that women can positively contribute to development of the people. The chairlady of one club said, “Men have realised that women can play an integral part in decisionmaking, and those that listen to the programmes always say a lot of good things about how women present the issues.”

There is some practical evidence for this: in village discussions about what projects to be proposed for support from ZAMSIF, the suggestions made by the women's clubs were usually accepted.

The president of the clubs feels great satisfaction at the way the radio programmes have become part of the communities' life. “It is really nice these days, people are really trying to understand what we are talking about on the radio. We come to the radio and discuss something, we come to church and they also discuss something. Sometimes the talks are just the same, like this using of condoms.”

Women's confidence extends to speaking to outsiders: “When the deputy Minister for Community Development visited the area, it was basically the women from the club who were speaking on a number of issues, more than the other groups.” “When visitors come here to make some meetings, they usually ask first, ‘Where can we find the Women's Club?'”

Political empowerment

Discussion of general political issues has emanated from just one of the clubs (Chito), but it has stimulated intense debate in the others. The young Chairlady of the Club in one of the smallest and inaccessible villages was very clear about the empowering effect of the project: “Women never used to discuss (political things) – such issues have arisen as a result of the radio programmes. This is very important and can change people's attitude and even the way they live. Before, women didn't even know that they had the right to speak about certain things and ask for correction when it was necessary, but with the introduction of the radio programmes women are able to speak about a lot of things. They didn't know that it was the fundamental right of women to freely talk about issues. …It has improved our thinking and understanding of things.”

As well as general rights, Chito club also discussed specific political rights and duties. Members were angry at being ignored by politicians. ”When the officials from the ruling party were going round they were giving out chitenga cloth and other things to the people, but they skipped this place, claiming that ‘People here are not interested in politics, they haven't even registered to vote'. But we said, In fact we are interested, but there is no registration office here.” So the club made programmes about services needed to facilitate voting such as polling stations (result - one was established in the village) and accessible centres for voter registration (a visit by the mobile voter registration unit was promised but did not take place); and the importance of voting for women MPs. Hearing this programme about MPs sparked off particularly lively discussion in one of the other clubs: most members disagreed, because they had seen little benefit from their current woman MP. Nine months after the broadcast, the subject still aroused passions: one member insisted on stating in the evaluation meeting her dissenting view that women MPs are important.