In the scope of the CHANGE Project, around 140 behaviour change activities have been implemented by the CHANGE Agents in four different countries. The activities ranged from private dinner meetings with just a few community members to bigger workshops discussing FGM together with community members and key professionals, such as health staff. The activities were organised by female as well as male CHANGE Agents and targetted both community youths as well as community elders.
Sometimes, the effect of these activities was immediately appreciable in such a way that the participant group was freely discussing FGM issues for the first time and participants felt that this was a big step to break the taboo in their community, in other cases individual participants even committed to get engaged themselves in the advocacy work to fight against FGM.
In order to show the effort and dedication that our CHANGE Agents put into their advocacy work, we present a few samples of behaviour change activities which took place.
http://www.change-agent.eu/index.php/our-activities/behaviour-change-examples
On the 28th of January 2015, just a few days before the International Zero Tolerance for FGM Day, the final conference of the pilot Project CHANGE took place at the Representative of the European Commission in Berlin. Almost 100 participants from various EU Member States gathered in order to follow the speeches and engage in fruitful discussions delivered by the CHANGE Agents, CHANGE Project partners, governmental officials and FGM experts. Throughout the day, Deutsche Welle journalist Mirjam Gehrke was moderating.
Within the framework of our CHANGE pilot Project, we have developed a training manual, aiming to facilitate future projects of this kind with know-how and expertise on how to tackle and handle recurring problems and issues. This manual serves as an input for facilitators and offers insights and ideas on workshops and behavioural patterns. It has been produced for future CHANGE facilitators to train multipliers (CHANGE Agents) promoting behaviour changes in FGM practicing communities across the European Union.
At the end of last year, the German television network 3sat aired a documentary about the work of the CHANGE Project in which the cultural programme “nano” visited Plan International in Hamburg. In the focus of their short, six-minutes broadcast are two of Plan’s CHANGE agents, Marie-Christine and Morou. nano gives you a small insight on the engagement of the agents for CHANGE and talks with them about the challenges they face, their experiences and the difficulties they tackle on their way to end female genital mutilation.
TERRE DES FEMME’s project coordination visited the CHANGE project partner RISK in Sweden to participate in one of the monthly exchange meetings with CHANGE Agents in Stockholm. The meeting provided the opportunity to present recent developments and to discuss current topics surrounding the progress of the project in Sweden.
On July 17th and 18th, 2014, CHANGE partners met at TERRE DES FEMMES’ office in Berlin to discuss the status of Behaviour Change Activities carried out by the Change Agents in all partner countries, the upcoming Europe-wide Training Curriculum, and the final CHANGE Conference, which takes place on January 28th 2015 in Berlin.
The meeting started with an update on implemented project activities. Subsequently, partners reported from their monthly exchange meetings with the Change Agent groups and about the activities, the Change Agents have carried out in their communities so far.
This brochure is designed as a guide for professionals in the social service, educational, and medical sector. It provides information about FGM, the legal situation in the respective country as well as responsibilities and responding strategies for key-professionals to protect girls at risk and to support affected girls and women. The content of the brochure has been developed in a joint effort of all partner organisations and is available in seven languages.
Download now:
On June 15th, Plan International in Germany organised its monthly exchange meeting for Change Agents. The Change Agents came together to share their experiences with implementing behaviour change activities in the communities and to discuss next steps with their facilitator Ms. Gwladys Awo-Pesch and representatives from Plan Germany, Ms. Anja Stuckert and from Plan Mali, Ms. Madina Bocoum Daff.
This brochure is designed as a guide for professionals in the social service, educational, and medical sector. It provides information about FGM, the legal situation in the respective country as well as responsibilities and responding strategies for key-professionals to protect girls at risk and to support affected girls and women. The content of the brochure has been developed in a joint effort of all partner organisations and will ultimately be available for download from our website in Dutch, English, German and Swedish.
You can download the brochure in our download section!
On 11th of April 2014 the REPLACE2 Conference was organised at the Coventry University, London, UK, which is one of the partners of the REPLACE2 project.
REPLACE2 is another EU-funded project within the Daphne Programme aiming at implementing and evaluating the REPLACE community based behaviour change framework to tackle female genital mutilation (FGM).