Women's Empowerment and Good Governance Through - amarc

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Best Experiences for an Action Research Process
tial, Radio Santo Domingo, Radio Los Andes and the Asociación de Comunicadores Sociales
Calandria).
The project had two main lines of action: first, the strengthening of women’s and youth’s organizational
abilities for citizen participation and vigilance, as well as the design of advocacy
strategies; and second, an attempt to encourage joint work between the organizations and
communications media to increase visibility and public advocacy of public policy proposals, as
well as consciousness-raising and promotion of citizen participation through the strengthening
of information services and the opening up of public debate. The project also sought to work
with local governments in institutional capacity building in order to improve the policies and
mechanisms of transparency and access to public information for citizen participation and
monitoring.
The concrete action was to train and accompany more than 300 women leaders during their
participation in the petition for a Participative Budget. This mechanism allowed organizations
to present proposals and projects through which they participated in decision-making on resources
allocation in the budget and in its implementation at local, provincial and regional levels.
The work of the CNR and of the participating radio stations and production centres began
with training workshops for journalists from the network, since they would be in charge both of
training the women leaders and of accompanying the process of reflecting on, choosing and
elaborating the proposals. Following this, trainings of organizations were centred on internal
communication tools and conflict resolution, laws for participation and gender and rights, as
well as on technical aspects such as drawing up work plans, advocacy and accountability of
local government management.
Radio and journalists have played a very important role in the accompaniment process, providing
the organizations with the tools for political advocacy work, that is, convincing the authorities
to receive the proposals presented by the organizations. Radio stations also committed
themselves to media advocacy work through special programs, information and consciousness-raising
campaigns and the organization of fora, debates and citizen festivals to inform
the population about the participative process, to make known the proposals worked on by the
organizations and, above all, to find out the opinion of the people on local development and
on the proposals.