Kvinners rettigheter i kirke og samfunn i Republikken Kongo

Background: EEC independent in 1961 with 300 000 – 400 000 members at present. Big impact in society. Women’s participation in decision making quite poor, and gender-based violence a vast problem in church and society. Pre project in 2012, pilot-project in 4 parishes plus church central administration 2013-2015.

Purpose/objective: Project objective: Make the Church, and through her the society, better able to ensure women's rights and prevent gender-based violence at all levels. Evaluation purpose: To ascertain whether the objectives of the pilot project are met and recommend adjustments in relation to the application for a permanent project that according to the plans will include many more parishes.

Methodology: An external evaluation with elements of participatory evaluation. Visit the project, observations, interviews and document review.

Key findings: The evaluation found that the project "Women's Rights in Church and society" is a very courageous project. After only two years of piloting, it has already managed to break a taboo and is now in process of opening up for a necessary discussion on the topics of gender-based violence and its consequences.

So far, the project has put the emphasis on sensitization sessions in order to disseminate the message to a maximum audience. The training sessions were offered to leaders of the project, project committees and some people in the departments of women and families, youth and Christian education. Training must be emphasized.

The project invited church members, both men and women to participate in awareness sessions, a third of adults are sensitized men. It is impressive that men have come at all. On the other side, to be efficient and to change the mentality and culture to violence based on gender, you have to reach the perpetrators, who are often men and young boys.

Pastors, evangelists and deacons are not yet trained/educated as a group, but in the pilot parishes they have participated.

People appear to be satisfied with the operation and the composition of the project board at national level and project committees at the parish level. To make the project a sustainable process within the church, it is important that the responsibility for this theme is placed in a Synodic department rather than being a project.

Recommendations: To use the resources in an effective way, and to facilitate sustainability of the process, it is recommended to set up an institutionalized process within the church as well as for the awareness propagation systems locally from 2015.

Insert in the awareness and training sessions communication methods in order to facilitate and motivate the audience to pass the messages to their surroundings

Target groups for awareness: keep the focus on women and adolescents / youth; make an extraordinary effort to reach men in general and the (potential) abusers in particular. This has to be implemented outside the church too.

To facilitate local ownership of the process, the project have to target decision-makers and pastors, evangelists and deacons in training in order to motivate them to work on women's rights and gender-based violence.

To facilitate local ownership, it is recommended that the Executive cell motivate pilot parishes to develop its own initiatives and activities. To plan the retirement of monitoring of each parish, it is advisable to develop criteria to measure how they master the subject and the awareness process.

For the future, the Church must choose between a full approach (which included support for victims) and awareness approach. This choice will instruct the number of parishes that can participate.

In the future, the church must also identify what services are best delivered by the church, and which are better delivered by other actors

In order to complement the activities of the EEC, it must seek partners/strategic alliances to:

•  reach out to a maximum audience with outreach and awareness,
• know where to refer victims
• to make advocacy

Comments from the organisation, if any: We found the evaluation and the report very accurate and helpful when planning a prolongation of the project. The balance between sensitization/training at one hand and taking care of victims in different ways at the other is tricky, when resources are limited. Dialogue with Digni has been helpful.

A challenge to prioritize in the right way when the requests are so big.

Viggo Koch Senior advisor for development and mission The covenant Church of Norway