Exploring Essor's gendered outcomes: community listening clubs as an effective instrument for enhancing women's economic empowerment
Community listening clubs can increase women's awareness of the business environment and realise broader empowerment outcomes
Abstract
This learning paper offers a clear, tested example of how community listening clubs can be used to effectively increase women’s awareness of the business environment and realise broader empowerment outcomes. It demonstrates how the approach Essor, and its partner Union Congolaise des Femmes des Médias (UCOFEM), has taken to sensitise men and women has helped to radically improve their awareness of positive masculinity, female entrepreneurship, and tax classification. This sensitisation approach engages directly with a relatively small number of female and male participants but reaches a much larger number of women and men by supporting the participants to share lessons within their community networks and through the broadcasting of group discussions across several radio stations. The learning paper also presents lessons for other development actors within - and beyond - the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) who are looking to emulate the community listening clubs as a strategy to positively impact on women at scale.
This work is an output from the ‘Flexible Facility for Business Environment Reform’ programme which is supported by the UK Department for International Development.
Citation
ESSOR (2019) Exploring Essor’s gendered outcomes: community listening clubs as an effective instrument for enhancing women’s economic empowerment. Essor Learning paper
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