ANANDI (Area Networking for Development Initiatives) is a women’s empowerment organisation working with women in tribal, muslim and scheduled caste communities of Gujarat in Eastern India.

GALS and PALS tools were used for gender action research as part of a 2003 participatory review on empowerment impact of their organisation, focusing particularly on response to the 2001 earthquake that devastated the area.

Key GALS innovations with ANANDI were:

• Use of Diamond tool for Gender-Based Violence to identify a hierarchy of types of violence experienced by women, and the extent of such violence including attempted murder by husband. Initially all women denied that violence existed.
• Use of Diamond Tool for gender differences in food security
• Use of network circle tool for raising awareness of social networks, even for women who thought they were alone
• Potential to adapt ANANDI’s existing Area Networking Events as self-funding gender events using GALS.

Jamgoria Sevabrata (JS) is an NGO in West Bengal. A PALS training funded by Trickle-Up US used PALS livelihood planning tools to help women plan how they would use a grant from Trickle-Up to invest in and increase income from different livestock

Most of the women JS work with are tribal Santal who spoke little Bengali while most of the paid staff were Bengali men who did not speak Santali. The staff said that PALS pictorial drawing tools enabled them to really communicate for the first time. The staff also drew their own visions and journeys and said they had ‘never felt so liberated’.

Peer learning snowball technique

A key innovation was the peer learning snowball technique so that larger numbers of women could come together and learn to draw in a shorter time.

Most of the women had not held a pen before and could not read and write at all. Facilitation followed a snowballing approach for 60 women in relays of 20. The first relay group were introduced to basic drawing skills and practised for half an hour.

Explain that everyone can draw. All drawings are just different types of lines (straight, curves, wiggly etc) and circles (round, rectangular, squishy, loopy etc). With a bit of thought you can draw anything that way.

Then the first group taught the next relay group basic drawing. That group then taught the third group while the facilitator returned to the first group to do more advanced drawing once everyone was happy. From being very shy and not talking initially, within an hour all the women were confidently laughing, talking and teaching each other.

The women quickly worked out ways of drawing lots of different types of goat – plain ones, stripy ones and foreign ones with bigger horns and needing to be tied with a rope on one leg. Others drew pigs of different types. They used filled dots and circle lines to represent different money to do their income calculations.

The subsequent days then introduced the Trickle Up manual for planning use of their grant. Participants were then followed up later by JS and/or TUP staff to simplify the formats they required for monitoring.

An international training for gender mainstreaming in micro-finance hosted by Hand in Hand in Chennai, South India and funded by IFMR used GALS tools to get some community indicators of women’s empowerment and happy families and see what differences there might be between women and men.

Participants were not nearly so poor as the tribal women in JS or ANANDI above. The women had a strong handicraft tradition and so could draw quite easily.

The women’s concepts of empowerment involved owning property, being able to go where they wanted, having a sense of identity and respect. These differed significantly from men’s concept of women’s empowerment which involved men buying women a cooking stove so that women could cook for the family.