Stories of marginalisation and discrimination explain the starting point of the journey of empowerment, influencing or amplification undertaken by the grantee partners and rightsholders.
Some reflections
assumptions and expected outcomes had to be modified to some extent, acknowledging the diversity of empowerment, amplification and influencing processes that were happening at multiple levels and for different rightsholder groups.The most significant change was that the rightsholders were placed right at the centre of the change process and hence, their narratives described the expected changes and impact most accurately. The grantee partners’ experiences and the narration of these experiences with all the challenges, learnings, and both high and low moments offer Voice an opportunity to share how the journey of change is shaping up. At the same time, the rightsholders describing their journeys express what they have experienced and learnt, hence illustrating the way they contribute to more responsive and inclusive societies.
As mentioned above, after a few years we revised several aspects of the ToC. Specifically, to visualise the interdependence between the three pathways and how the journeys of individual rightsholders and grantee partners are not linear and often unpredictable. As such, putting rightsholders and grantee partners at the centre by looking at their individual journeys became ever more important as Voice matured as an intervention. ‘Social change processes follow a complex path where change shifts over time.’ (Voice Annual Report 2019, page 14). This key finding led to a further sharpening of the Voice Toe and its underlying assumptions. The changing social dynamics in many countries meant that relationships between state actors and civil society shifted. A participatory exercise with grantee partners and rightsholders revealed that the original
Rightsholders making change happen draws out the pathways to the changed outcomes around the lives of rightsholders.
Rightsholders ready to shine on locates the grantee partners and rightsholders where they are now after having partnered with Voice through grantmaking and/ or Linking& Learning.
The following stories embody rightsholder experiences of discrimination and marginalisation. They aided the grantee partners and the Voice team to better understand how discrimination and marginalisation affect rightsholders and how it tends to be entrenched in social structures.
Stories of discrimination and marginalization
Due to discrimination and marginalisation, different rightsholders face significant difficulties living in their social contexts. When rightsholders shared the stories of their past, the Voice team noted two common threads regarding the discrimination and marginalisation they experience. The first thread links to the more visible forms of systemic discrimination and marginalisation that comes out of state policies, denials of human rights, abuse of legal and political rights as well as cultural and traditional value systems. The second thread links to the less visible forms of normative discrimination and marginalisation, where rightsholders are being perceived to be different based on norms and values in their families, surroundings or society at large.
The organisation Laura joined, Carolina for Kibera, works to create a supportive community culture and mitigate stigma and discrimination related to teenage pregnancy. Teenage pregnancy is often the cause of school dropout and other social and economic challenges facing teenage mothers.
Learning more from our journey:
For this Learning Document, we looked at hundreds of stories from the five rightsholder groups. The captured Stories of Change (mostly about the journeys of individual rightsholders) and Impact Stories (about the journeys of the Voice grantee partners’ projects) show how, and how far rightsholders found their voices, organised themselves, and/or achieved changes within their societies. We also investigated the Outcome Statements that were written by many of the
grantee partners as part of the Outcome Harvesting (OH) methodology Voice uses to capture narratives about changes from their perspectives. We selected several stories that exemplify the different journeys, and we will present these narratives in three parts:
Laura’s Story of Change from Kenya: “I am Woman, I am Mother (Part 1/3)
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