T-Shirts to Web Links: What Was Learned

- from T-Shirts to Web Links: Women Connect! Building Communications Capacity with Women's NGOs

What Was Learned: Guidance for Future Work


Communication Campaigns and Strategic Use of Media

It is important for women's organisations to conduct community-based research, including needs assessments and pre-tests, to be certain their messages are communicating clearly to their intended audiences. Some women's NGOs engaged in outreach do this already; many others welcome training in these skills. Groups come quickly to understand the need for designing and doing needsassessments, participatory research, and testing of messages and materials. The process may be time-consuming and expensive, but groups learn that different target audiences receive messages in different ways and thus have to be reached in different ways.

Women's NGOs engaged in advocacy and outreach need to consider designing and implementing a campaign, strategically, using multiple forms of media. Effective campaigns have limited objectives and can measure their results. Research from around the world tells us that campaigns are most effective when multiple media (such as booklets, radio, posters and drama) are combined.

Women's organisations need to learn how to relate effectively to mass media professionals. Insteadof seeing interaction with mass-media professionals (journalists, editors and even owners) only from their own point of view, women's groups need would be more effective if they develop long-term relationships that are mutually beneficial. This includes becoming known to reporters as local "experts" and "sources" for information, designing exciting and visual media events, and respecting journalists' deadlines. Organisations that have good relationships with mass media professionalsare generally much more satisfied with how they are portrayed.

Information Communication Technology

Each organisation has unique needs and must find its own way to integrate ICT – gradually – into its work. To become an effective organisational tool, ICT cannot be used occasionally or superficially. Organisations must internalise ICT strategies in their activities, but this adoption must be strategic and gradual. Organisations that are just beginning to develop ICT capacity should resistthe urge to design sophisticated websites that are too overwhelming to maintain.

Introducing new technology into an organisation causes changes that place pressure on systems, relationships, communication and management styles. For example, will the system of one person opening up regular mail be transferred intact to opening up e-mail? Who will have access to the Internet and e-mail? In many developing countries, computers are typically tools for secretaries, not for management. With the advent of Internet, it becomes necessary for management and other people in the organisation to develop technology skills. There is also need within each NGO for a designated staff member to provide oversight and leadership on ICT issues.

There is need for women's organisations to engage at the ICT policy level. As the discussion continues about extending Internet access in developing countries, it is urgent that women's organisations speak strongly about the need for equitable access.

Health

Reproductive and sexual health and rights figure prominently in the issues of concern in communities where the NGOs work. Issues of domestic violence, HIV/AIDS, sexually-transmitted infections (STIs), cervical cancer, and safe motherhood emerged as priorities in all three countries. Violence against women is so common and its ramifications so great (including unwanted pregnancy, sexually-transmitted infection, abortion and depression) that it should always be considered a women's health issue. Unsafe abortions continue to take place where stigma against teenage pregnancy or pregnancy among unmarried women remains extremely high. Women wantinformation on family planning options and available services. So do adolescents, but they still facea stigma when seeking reproductive health services and, as a result, most shy away. In all cases, poverty is cited as a major factor in determining knowledge of and access to proper health services.

Women are eager to learn techniques of negotiating safe sex to protect themselves from STIs, especially HIV. In many places awareness is high, but many women lack the power to negotiate safe sex. For this reason, there is great interest in new innovations such as emergency contraception and other woman-controlled methods of contraception and disease prevention – all generally beyond their reach at present.

There is great demand for up-to-date health information and much interest among women's NGOs in downloading and "repackaging" women's health information from the Internet. "Repackaging" information from Internet sources on women's health emerged as an objective ofseveral organisations after Women Connect! supplied them with lists of websites providing information on women's health topics. These groups cited the opportunity to cheaply and quickly access new information instead of relying on outdated resources in their libraries. Groups, especially in Uganda, took the initiative to find Internet information, download it, adapt it to the local context, simplify it for readability, in some cases translate it into the local language, and print and distribute it in brochures, booklets and newsletters to people who have no access to the Internet. This remainsan important area for technical collaboration.

All reproductive and sexual health training should include a communication component. WomenConnect! has revealed the need to include communication skills as part of all training to improvereproductive and sexual health. Training needs to emphasise the importance of research on what target groups think, want and feel. Training that helps organisations understand their audiences benefits both those organisations and their communities. Health communicators and professionals often fail in this critical area. They think about content and new information but often fail tounderstand how to reach the client with language and concepts that the client understands.

Sustained effort and strategies are needed. The media campaigns related to health demonstratedthe complexity of these issues and the need for sustained strategies. Stopping teenage pregnancies, for example, is a multifaceted challenge that cannot be met by a campaign of just one year. The media campaigns funded by Women Connect! small grants were pilots to learn lessons for broader efforts.

There is both need and opportunity for women's organisations to link with government health ministries and health care providers. Most Ministry of Health staff and service providers are generally not familiar with the NGO community and vice versa. Government staff in Zimbabwe, Zambia and many other countries possess considerable skills in conducting media campaigns onhealth and social issues. The Women Connect! training workshop used government-sponsored media campaigns (a Youth Responsibility campaign, a Vitamin A campaign and an HIV/AIDS campaign) as case studies, with the campaign staff facilitating the sessions. The presentation of successful wellresearched national campaigns as case studies during training helped the women's organisations understand how they can design and implement campaigns themselves. While the campaignspresented as case studies were carried out by large agencies with substantial resources, the trainingoutlined a process that could be adopted at a modest scale by small organisations. There are many lessons and strategies that can be shared in both directions.

Networking

Women's NGOs say they want more structured collaboration and networking with each other in order to learn, avoid duplication and work more strategically, but it is difficult. Networking and collaboration should never be assumed. The women's NGO community operates in a context of limited resources and competing agendas -- which often discourages networking. Networking is typically sporadic and crisis-driven. Women's groups do collaborate well at times, but usually around a crisis. While ICT makes it easier for groups to reach each other without physically connecting, there is still need for a specific time when groups can meet to discuss program strategies.

Northern donors and NGOs supporting southern NGOs can foster greater collaboration among the southern NGOs by encouraging them to work together around common issues. The external evaluator found "numerous examples of strategic partnerships and alliances that would seem to have made sense in this process." The evaluation stated: "Groups producing materials on reproductive health, HIV/AIDS or violence against women, for example -- whether in repackaging projects, oras part of media campaigns -- would have been well-served by combining forces, sharing topics, resources and distribution channels, rather than each producing different publications and then running out of funds to produce more, let alone distribute these. Despite several group meetings and suggestions by the project management team, these kinds of partnerships failed to materialise. This raises important questions regarding the design of Women Connect!. The issue is whether insteadof providing several small grants to many organisations, fewer larger grants could have been provided to a cluster or clusters of organisations around a few specific themes that have particular relevance to women's health and well-being" (Morna 2001, pp.74-75). The fact that WomenConnect! allowed the groups such latitude in picking topics for their small-grants projects meant that not many groups shared the same topics or objectives.

Umbrella organisations may seem optimal partners, but do not automatically facilitate networking. Our attempt to work through existing umbrella organisations to foster networking and produce a "cascade" of benefits to the NGO community was not very successful. In spite of their good will, none of the umbrella organisations fully functioned in the way we had envisioned – as equal partners that would participate in the training and follow through thereafter supporting project activities. Often they have competing priorities such as legislative lobbying and government mishandling of women's issues. The umbrella organisation may also be competing for funding with organisations it represents. Often they are short of staff and experience tremendous personnel turnover. Sometimes there is no staff person in charge of communication. Thus, while it may be good to involve them, they should not be seen as providing an automatic or ideal structure for networking or extending project benefits to other organisations.

Program Structure Issues

The broad scope and flexibility of Women Connect! were beneficial in many ways, but also problematic. This relates directly to the issues of values that we grappled with in designing theproject. The final external evaluation summed up the dilemma as follows: "Women Connect walked a perpetual tightrope between not wishing to be prescriptive and at the same time ensuring a realistic set of options.... In an effort to achieve the former, the program ran the risk of losing focus and effectiveness....The broad range of themes, and loose coordination between the various components, despite strenuous efforts by the project implementers to achieve greater synergy, limited theirimpact. While the desire to define women's health and well-being broadly is commendable, this may have contributed to a lack of sufficient focus." [31]Women Connect! was broad in three ways: combining ICT and media strategy; defining health very broadly; and allowing latitude in the wide range of topics NGOs proposed for their small-grant projects. This was not a question of careless project design. Rather the issue goes directly to the values that underpinned the project and the ethical and design dilemmas, described above, that weconfronted at the outset.

A longer timeframe (than three years) is needed for optimal implementation of a complex project such as Women Connect!. The Women Connect! timeframe was too short, given the complex project design (media strategy and ICT combined, health broadly defined, and implementation of small-grants projects), the numbers of countries (three) and organisations (30) participating, thebreadth of subjects accepted for small-grants projects, and the reality of staff turnover. Communication interventions involve complex technology and strategising. This is especially true where telephone lines and power are not yet reliable. Organisations need ongoing attention and timely visits and input. One year for the women's groups to implement their small-grant projects was not enough, especially when a major objective was to build capacity through the process. It is hard for a northern organisation to anticipate the complexity and hurdles involved. For example, wiring money to organisations that do not have a hard currency account is a serious problem,especially given massive ongoing currency devaluation such as occurred in Zimbabwe. Even facilitated by e-mail, the realities and challenges are daunting. Women Connect! would have allowed more time had resources permitted. This was part of the impetus behind securing additional fundsfor the groups through the Global Fund for Women.

The four-day workshop (two days each for media and ICT) was only introductory training. A considerable amount of learning takes place as organisations set about applying knowledge conveyed during a workshop. NGO staff usually have less comfort and skills in information technology than with traditional media, and have to master mechanical functions before they can venture intopractical uses of ICT to advance the content areas of their organisations. Women Connect! includedextended staff training in e-mail and Internet skills, and the learning continued throughout the project. With regard to media campaigns, Women Connect! introduced a systematic way of developing and disseminating messages that required groups to be methodological in their work, aprocess that increases the time for implementation. Most media projects reported that the process they experienced was more involved than what they had envisioned. This has implications in terms of staff time and organisational resources. If possible, training should be extended over additional days and conducted in several phases.

Training and workshops can be beneficial in providing new information, but dedicated funds (e.g., small grants) are needed to assure that the new information is put to use. Ideally,informational or training workshops should be conducted only as part of a broader plan for implementing funded activities based on the new information. Not all organisations that attended the Women Connect! workshops applied for a small grant to carry out action introduced by the workshops. The introductory information gained was probably beneficial even to those groups thatdid not apply for a small grant. But far more beneficial was the hands-on learning of the organisations that applied for and received the small grants.

By focusing on traditional media, mass media and ICT together, Women Connect! has contributed to strengthening organisational capacity. Using this approach, organisations can examine their communication mission in a comprehensive way and identify strengths and weaknesses. Many of the participating organisations report an increased overall understanding of communication issues and strategies. This was accompanied by increased sensitivity to the needs of their communities, as a result of media campaign research, and an increased sense ofconnectedness to other organisations working on similar issues.

An innovation such as this is more likely to succeed when it engages staff at all levels of the organisation, from directors to operations support. While staff are the implementers of technical skills within an organisation, they need an enabling environment in order to succeed. The women's organisations whose directors were most informed and engaged in Women Connect! generally had greater success with Women Connect! For this reason Women Connect! held a parallel workshop with directors of the participating NGOs, at which directors of the organisations that were alreadyeffectively using the new technologies got up and described the benefits to the other directors (forexample, ACFODE's director telling about the unsolicited grant that came via ACFODE's web site). Local women were making the case, not the Women Connect! team. This had a keep-up-with-your-neighbor effect and also helped reduce the intimidation many initially feel with ICT.

In selecting partner organisations, interest and commitment of the organisation's director is essential. Without enthusiasm and support from the organisation's leader, it is unlikely that anewly-introduced innovation will be successful. This should be among criteria for selecting partner organisations.

Staff turnover is inevitable, contributes to organisation frailty and is a serious issue that needsto be anticipated in project design. About a third of the participating NGOs experienced massiveturnover during the three years of Women Connect! This means that staff trained at the beginning of a project may no longer be with the organisation when it comes time to put the training into practice. This then requires retraining or additional technical assistance. Turnover derives, in part, from the vagaries of soft-money funding and related dependence on volunteers. Project planners should anticipate this and plan accordingly, including for retraining.

Women's NGOs vary greatly in their capacity and sophistication, a fact that must be considered in developing plans. Some are very capable and sophisticated, others much less so. This has a direct impact on their ability to implement activities. This reality does not mean avoiding the newer, smaller or less capable organisations, but it must be taken into consideration when planning collaboration.

The use of local experts and consultants is importantWomen Connect! worked hard to find appropriate local African experts who could participate as trainers and technical advisors, assist inproject monitoring and conduct a final external evaluation, consonant with both our values and our goal of building local capacity. It is a challenge to find persons who combine communication skills with other needed expertise. The project had varying levels of success in each country, from consultants who provided excellent technical assistance to those who simply monitored adherence to timeline and budgets; some missed appointments and neglected contractual duties. Nevertheless, this was a necessary complement to the U.S.-based project team.

Finally, a major finding of the external evaluation was that there was no corruption or misappropriation of funds by the women's NGOs. This is an important indicator of seriousness and commitment. "The tangible outcomes, visits and inquiries leave little doubt that all monies were spent scrupulously on intended outcomes," states the evaluator. [32]

32 Morna, 2001, p.9. The same finding, concerning responsible use of funds by women's NGOs, also emerged from evaluation research by the Pacific Institute for Women's Health. That study, of 56 women's NGOs, found only one instance of misappropriation of funds – this by a man hired as the financial officer by one women's NGO in Nepal (Andina and Pillsbury, 1998, p.10).

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