Community Empowerment and Advocacy Strategies Module 2

Community Empowerment and Advocacy

• Empowerment refers to the process by which people gain control over the factors and decisions that shape their lives.
• It involves increasing assets and attributes, building capacities to gain access, partners, networks, and/or a voice, in order to gain control.
• Empowerment is not something that can be done to others, but rather it is something that people can only do for themselves by acquiring more power.

Definition of Community Empowerment

• According to the World Health Organization, community empowerment is the process of enabling communities to increase control over their lives.
• It assumes that people are their own assets, and the role of the external agent is to catalyze, facilitate, or accompany the community in acquiring power.
• Community empowerment is more than involvement, participation, or engagement of communities; it implies community ownership and action that explicitly aims at social and political change.

Types of Empowerment

• Individual Empowerment: works to increase self-efficacy of individuals or their sense of personal power, strength, and mastery.
• Psychological Empowerment: individuals and groups acquire an increased sense of awareness and understanding of the issues that affect them.
• Organizational Empowerment: members of organizations become more effective in working toward the empowerment of communities.
• Community Empowerment: the result of a community that can manage its resources and can exercise control over the factors that affect them.
• Societal Empowerment: there is a fair and equal distribution of resources, and community members are able to challenge oppression, segregation, and discrimination.

Participatory Development

• It is a process through which stakeholders can influence and share control over development initiatives.
• The success and sustainability of a project will be more attainable if the local community is engaged in the process of development.
• Participatory development recognizes the power of local knowledge and highlights the uniqueness of people’s knowledge in many communities.

Community Empowerment and Globalization

• Community empowerment recognizes and strategically acts upon the inter-linkage between local and global factors.
• It ensures that power is shared at both local and global levels.

Communication and Community Empowerment

• Communication plays a vital role in ensuring community empowerment.
• Participatory approaches in communication that encourage discussion and debate result in increased knowledge and awareness, and a higher level of critical thinking.

Advocacy

• The word "advocacy" comes from the Latin "advocare" and literally means "to call out for support".
• Advocacy is the act or process of supporting a cause or proposal, the act or process of advocating.
• It is a tool for "putting a problem on the agenda, providing a solution to that problem, and building support for acting on both the problem and the solution".

Strategies of Empowerment and Advocacy

• Root Cause analysis: a strategy for empowerment and advocacy.