Local activists, leaders, and experts are best positioned to challenge the harmful social and gender norms within their communities that contribute to HIV transmission, gender-based violence (GBV), and other poor health outcomes.
This brief discusses the experience of the CHAMPION Project in Tanzania, which trained and supported community partners in 14 urban districts in 10 regions of Tanzania to plan and implement gender transformative HIV and gender-based violence (GBV) prevention activities in their communities. The project used community-level ‘champions’ to lead local actions to raise awareness about HIV and GBV, champion equitable gender norms to promote long term behaviour and social change related to sexual and reproductive health (SRH), and encourage community members to test for HIV. These community champions were found to be critical allies within Tanzania’s HIV prevention efforts, a “promising approach to engendering social change and improving sexual and reproductive health outcomes.” This brief forms part of a series of CHAMPION briefs to highlight some of the project’s achievements.
The brief discusses the importance of partnerships across various levels of intervention, including working with local partners to identify champions to serve as change agents; building partners’ capacity around in-depth understanding of gender norms; and building leadership, communication, and community mobilisation skills. These community-level partners “planned and led a variety of activities in their communities to create awareness, promote behaviour change, and stimulate community dialogue about gender norms, HIV, SRH, and GBV.” Their activities included community dialogues, discussions, video shows, street dialogues and theatre, health fairs, sporting events, and rallies, all of which are briefly explained in the publication.
Based on learning from the project, the brief outlines a number of recommendations:
- Go local: “…community interventions and related capacity building must be tailored to specific communities and to the partners who are working to lead social change. Efforts should be made to identify audio-visual materials that resonate with community members. The more ‘foreign’ the messenger, the less likely the message is to resonate.”
- Creativity matters: Messages should be “clever, catchy, persuasive, compelling, and tailored to the local context.” They should provoke discussion and reflection, rather than reiterate facts people already know.”
- Avoid the blame game: Positive approaches can best contribute to a more constructive dialogue about gender norms, why inequities exist, how they are harmful, why challenging them is important, and how they can be transformed.
- Programme holistically: Programmes should ensure that community capacity building and engagement is accompanied by the availability and accessibility of health services. “Service providers must also have the capacity, resources, and commodities available that are needed to provide the full range of client-centred services for HIV, RH, and GBV prevention and response.”