主播大秀

As the world marks International Women's Day, we reflect how long it really takes to change perceptions on women's rights and gender equality and recognise that even incremental change is important. What works, what doesn't, who needs to be involved and why making local media content in local contexts is key to challenge - and change - thinking about gender roles.

As part of 主播大秀 Media Action's commitment to gender transformative programming we aim to challenge thinking on gender roles in many areas including women's participation in decision making, their engagement in economic activities, their determination of their sexual and reproductive health rights and behaviours and norms which condone violence against women and girls.

We know from our research on and other projects around the world that changing gendered expectations and perceptions of the roles of girls and boys and women and men takes time and that our drama programmes need to show different characters - both men and women, parents, school teachers and other influential members of the community challenging stereotypes in different ways that are sufficiently credible for audiences to engage with. So this may mean showing characters making small changes initially and then more significant changes over time. Similarly, our factual programmes bring a range of voices together to discuss issues and we seek to ensure that female role models and male gender champions who are able to challenge gender inequality and discrimination and inspire others to do the same, participate in programmes.

Part of this process is to have a good understanding of the local contexts where we are working. This means listening to the views of women and men, girls and boys to understand their concerns and priorities, it means discussing issues with our partners, donors and with our staff in different teams and looking at both our organisational research and doing a wider literature review in the countries and regions where we work. Doing a thorough gender analysis in this way helps us to identify the discriminatory gender norms that we want to address in our programming and that we can learn more about through our formative research. We have learned from experience that if we do not do this, then we risk designing projects and programmes that: do not reach women and girls; do not address the issues of concern to them; do not enable their voices to be heard and may reinforce gender stereotypes and perpetuate gender inequality that affects both women and men.

Understanding the local context is also a key step in developing a gender sensitive theory of change for our project. A theory of change process is a crucial part of ensuring our project design is of high quality. It helps us understand how change happens in the contexts where we work and our role in contributing to change, it helps us identify what we want to change for who, making sure that we consider change for women and men, it helps us clarify who we should work with, who has power and influence (both positive and negative) over the changes we are working towards, which factors we need to consider when we plan our activities to achieve change and the ways in which we need to strengthen our capacities and support our partners' capacities. The theory of change also informs our research, which aims to tell us how change is happening and why and whether our assumptions hold true.

So it was encouraging that our research for the girls' education project in South Sudan showed that women in the our audiences were taking on new responsibilities within the household - including making joint decisions about finances and the education of their children - and while we cannot prove a direct line between this outcome and listening to our programmes yet, it certainly suggests we are making inroads.

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Learn more about using media to understand and challenge gender stereotypes with our online toolkit here: