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Community Empowerment Program
Dignity for All
Our vision is a world where everyone is treated equally and respectfully; where they are able to live a life free from harm; where they have the tools they need to determine their own future and fulfill their potential.
Our Community Empowerment Program (CEP) empowers communities to change their own lives.
We use a human rights-based approach that ensures everything we do reinforces human rights and responsibilities.
Maximizing Impact
Community Empowerment Program (CEP) participants share their knowledge of human rights and responsibilities learned in class sessions to all interconnected groups and their social networks.
In this way, that knowledge becomes the catalyst for positive change on a community, regional and national level.
Using a coordinated outreach approach called ‘organized diffusion’, we help to maximize the impact of this spread of knowledge.
Ensuring Sustainability
Communities create 17-member democratically-selected Community Management Committees (CMC) trained in project management and social mobilization skills by Tostan. These committees continue to lead development projects that are relevant to their community needs, long after the community has completed the Tostan program.
Through our Empowered Communities Network we connect CMCs with other organizations for resources and skills needed to continue their community development.
Our Success
- Declarations of public abandonment of female genital cutting (FGC) and child/forced marriage
- Promotion of grassroots democracy
- Enhancement of economic opportunities at a local level
- Emergence of female leadership in the community
- Improvement of literacy and math skills
- Improved behaviors for the reduction of malaria, HIV/AIDS, and other diseases
- Increased enrollment of girls in formal school
- Protection of maternal and child health
- Protection of children’s rights.
