ENGAGE WOMEN’S EMPOWERMENT and ACTIVE CITIZENSHIP Engage is a five-year initiative co-designed by Coady Institute and five partner organizations: Self Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) in India; Organization for Women in Self Employment (WISE) in Ethiopia; Gender Training Institute (GTI) of the Tanzania Gender Networking Programme (TGNP); Christian Commission for Development (CCDB) in Bangladesh; and Centre Haïtien du Leadership et de l’Excellence (CLE) in Haiti. Coady is a convenor and is bringing these partners together in ways that they can share their expertise with one another. At its core, Engage recognizes that while empowerment entails change in the lives of individual women and their interpersonal relations, the concept of active citizenship refers to women’s capacity to participate in public and economic life. The project works primarily with informal sector women in addressing key issues they are facing. This includes the future of work faced by women; engaging women in community governance; women’s leadership on climate change issues;
young women as entrepreneurs and agents of community change; and asset-based approaches to reducing urban and rural poverty through economic development. Engage is a unique melding of asset-based approaches and women’s leadership development with a focus on community engagement, organizational change, and learning and influence. The project recognizes the importance of collective local leadership for change, and the power of groups in sharing knowledge amongst themselves; improving organizational capacity and change; and the value of learning and influence through action research, outreach to other organizations, and policy influence. A key component of the Engage program is learning. The Engage newsletters and publications feature updates, key lessons, and changes which partners are seeing and can be found at https://issuu.com/coadystfx/stacks
ENGAGE BY THE NUMBERS To Date:
$10,397,117
$9,797,117
100,000
149
Project
people reached through training, organizing and advocacy
14 | COADY INSTITUTE
GAC contribution
partner staff/network members in online courses
$600,000 partner contribution
107
off campus courses
Expe
5
new or re pro
