Micronarratives
CASE STUDY – CAMBODIA
Investigating gender transformations for WASH staff in Cambodia
Data Collection
Audio Surveys
Unpacking significance
Data Analysis
Thematic Analysis
Data Visualisation
Personas
Sensemaking Workshop
Background
Water for Women is Australia’s flagship water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) program supporting improved health, equality and wellbeing in Asian and Pacific communities through socially inclusive and sustainable WASH projects. Water for Women is delivering 18 WASH projects in 15 countries together with 11 research projects (2018-2022).
Sanitation Marketing Scale-Up Program 3 (SMSU3), a water and sanitation intervention implemented by iDE Cambodia contains multiple funding streams including DFAT’s Water for Women fund. The program operates in six rural provinces supporting the promotion and sale of latrines, water filters, faecal sludge management and handwashing systems through private enterprises.
This study was completed as a part of Jess MacArthur’s doctoral research on gender transformations in the WASH sector (UTS HREC REF NO. ETH19-4343) and funded Australian Government’s Water for Women Fund and in collaboration with iDE Cambodia’s SMSU3 program.
Assessment objective
SMSU3 has sought gender-transformative change for beneficiaries, change agents and staff. Using photovoice, this research sought to understand what changes are occurring for staff members and the mechanisms towards this change to better implement gender training for all staff.
Theoretical framework
Paulo Freire was Brazilian philosopher who studied social transformations which involving empowering communities and individuals to overcome inequalities. He worked closely with adult education and learning.
Freire identified that social transformations occur through critical consciousness, a process of critical reflection leading to critical action. We have adapted this model to suggest that critical reflection happens as observation and self-reflection.
Participants
176 staff of the SMSU3 project in Cambodia participated.
Data Collection
- Respective (backwards looking) stories of change were collected using micro-narratives.
- Micro-narratives are short audio or text stories which describe changes that the participants report on.
- Stories were to be true, personal and related to the program.
- Staff used their own phones to share their stories using an online survey format in Qualtrics and Phonic.
- The prompts solicited personal changes related to SMSU3 for all field staff members during October 2020.
- 176 staff participated as several opted out of the study.
Data Analysis
- Reported changes were then clustered based on the verbs (action words) that were used in the stories.
- From these verbs, personas were developed that represent the different types of staff changes.
- Personas were triangulated using natural language processing algorithms (Latent Dirichlet Allocation and Structural Topic Modelling).
- Personas were then reviewed with key project leadership in a Sensemaking Workshop in June 2021.
Key Findings
For SMSU3 staff, gender transformations carry four underlying motivations: peace, progress, prosperity and happiness.
Outputs
Eliciting stories of gender-transformative change: Investigating the effectiveness of question prompt formulations in qualitative gender assessments
Leveraging story-based evaluation methods, this article explores the assessment of complex gender-transformations and focuses on effective question prompts to elicit significant and meaningful narratives of change from both women and men.
Type: Journal Article
Date: May 2021
Citation:
MacArthur J, Carrard N, Kozole T, et al. (2022) Eliciting stories of gender- transformative change: Investigating the effectiveness of question prompt formulations in qualitative gender assessments. Evaluation 28(3): 308–329. DOI: 10.1177/13563890221105537.
Exploring gender transformations for staff members of iDE Cambodia’s SMSU3 WASH Program: Visual Persona Report
This visual report shares the persona results of the midline evaluation of a gender mainstreaming intervention in Cambodia. The report focuses on personas, an innovative evaluation technique used to create personas of change.
Type: Visual Report
Date: August 2021
