Engaging Men - The Abatangamuco and Women's Empowerment in Burundi

The present project is a collaboration between CARE Norway and PRIO researcher Hilde Wallacher, born from the research interests of the gender research team at PRIO and CARE’s preference for research-based evaluations of their activities. Over the last couple of years, the question of the role of men in women’s empowerment processes has become increasingly pervasive.1 At the same time, actual programming for this purpose tends to be limited to small-scale, single-issue projects related to, for example, HIV protection or reproductive health. This study addresses CARE’s efforts to work with and through a local Burundian organisation of rural men, the Abatangamuco, as a way to address the need to engage men in a more fundamental and holistic manner in their on-going efforts for women’s empowerment.