African Transformation Research Articles

Reconstructing Gender Norms Through Ritual Communication: A Study of African Transformation

African Transformation (AT) is a community development program informed by James Carey's notion of ritual communication and Paulo Freire's theory of critical pedagogy. AT features video portraits of ordinary people in Tanzania, Uganda, and Zambia who have overcome gender-based obstacles to better their lives. In Uganda, women and men gathered to interrogate common beliefs and explore actions they could take in light of the real-life stories portrayed in the videos. We hypothesized that individuals who participated in the program would be more likely than nonparticipants to express high levels of self-efficacy, espouse equitable gender norms, and report high levels of agency. Multivariate regression analysis, controlling for socioeconomic characteristics, confirmed that hypothesis.