Community Outreach
A community that reflects its people is uniquely positioned to revive faith, restore hope and reveal love in the community. Quite naturally, social justice, societal change process of norms, practices and attitudes become part of the equation.
PICOT and Advance Afrika in partnership with Uganda Prisons Service (UPS) with funding from European Union (EU) is implementing an Action “Empowering local communities to prevent violence against women and children in West Nile”
The overall objective of the action is to empower women and children in Koboko and Arua districts to live peaceful and dignified lives as they enjoy their economic, social and cultural rights. The intervention seeks to achieve two overall outcomes: Oc1) Female (ex)inmates have access to improved and impactful rehabilitation and reintegration services; Oc2) Community structures actively engage in changing attitudes, perceptions and practices regarding respect for women’s and children’s rights.
one of the activities under the project is Community Outreach with Participatory Theater.
PICOT trained a drama group in Forum theater. Upon empowering the forum theater group, the trained group have bee engaged in performing forum theater plays in a participatory way in order to engage communities in dialogue around SGBV.
The purpose of the outreach is to sensitive and empower communities to say NO to SGBV, prevent and protect the rights of women and children.
Changing attitudes, perceptions and practices regarding respect for women’s and children’s rights needs a holistic approach where opportunity is given for the community to share human interest stories, experience and dialogue to trigger discussions around sensitive societal topics, such as oppression, discrimination and equality.
The community outreach offers a platform that brings together the community and participants form different walks of life including the duty bears to discuss and respond to patent issues to the community. The envisioned societal change process of norms, practices and attitudes in this action will be further driven and triggered through direct engagement of the communities, using the method of forum theater.