Social Media as a tool for WRO programming

Social Media as a tool for WRO programming and advocacy Fidelia Chemane - Mozambique

Contents • Motive • Action / Strategy • Results

Motive Although WVL-ALIADAS has planned activities to stimulate women's digital literacy, our experience stems from the following factors: • The COVID-19 outbreak; • On the one hand, the partners' ways of doing were totally compromised. Our tradition of mobilization, advocacy and engagement is essentially oral and requires face-toface contacts. How to implement the original ideas in an adverse and somewhat unknown context, whilst also dealing with new needs and priorities; • On the other hand, the program was deprived of the possibility of ensuring the correct monitoring of the implementation of the projects and the quality of the intervention, from the first moments; • But more worrying was the challenge of keeping WVL relevant in this new context, without losing its essence.

Motive • The WVL needed to respond to the priorities and needs that COVID unveiled for the lives of women and at the same time remain relevant, in this context, without losing its spirit and essence. Clearly, it involved responding to COVID through an approach that allowed for dynamic movement. Thus the Com. Vida women platform was created - a Whats. App group; • The Platform is today the most active with more than 60 WROs, 99 activists and friends of the Movement, including representatives of state sovereignty bodies and Government institutions; • It was in this group that the Action Plan for responding to COVID-19 was designed, which today funds prevention and mitigation actions, of 36 WROs, across the country (11 provinces); • In the context of the failure of WROs' work methodologies and the traditional spaces and formats of interaction, concertation, sharing of information and experiences, the Platform has become the gathering place. • This experience demanded and inspired our action to use Social Media for the purposes of programming and advocacy.

What have we done? • A quick mapping of the partners' digital literacy • Basic training / virtual training on the use of TECHs / Social Media • The need to operationalize the program's feminist MEL approach led to the development of an ambitious project for a platform (https: //aliadasemmovimento. org/site/? lang=en ), which became the first, inclusive digital space combining, in one place, the richness of Mozambican feminism with online training (especially in transformative feminist leadership), learning and activism - a lively, light and safe place for the voice and the participation of all groups

Action / Strategy • Provided tailored technical assistance, including the creation of Social Media tools for WROs; • Encouraged the use of Social Media and the program's digital platform for all advocacy activities, including programming and MEL • Provided quick response funds to broaden and deepen the debates on concrete and priority issues (mainly related to access to essential services, GBV etc. ) and to make specific issues visible through social media.

What we celebrate An Active Community around women's issues, specifically around the response to Covid-19

The ability of WROs, especially small, informal and emerging groups to use Social Media to expose problems and make their interventions visible in real time

Signs of recognition of the potential of the digital and social media space to increase visibility and precipitate the results of WRO interventions and some quick wins that indicate a move towards digital activism

https: //emaze. me/2020 genero#2

What we celebrate The opportunity that the strategy created to stay relevant and to survive without losing our essence

Obrigada Fidelia Chemane - Mozambique