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The Empowerment Guide

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The Empowerment Guide brings together a range of tools, methods and experience that can inspire and give new ideas to people who engage with political empowerment processes in the Global South. The guide does not provide a blueprint or ready-made answers for how to best promote political empowerment everywhere. It encourages the reader to be reflective not only about the specific methods and tools that you use or could use. The guide does this by posing questions related to understanding the local power relations, social barriers, and the political culture that prevails in a particular context, but also more specific questions about how to concretely engage with the people who are in the process of empowering themselves or who could be included in such a process.

In this guide we suggest approaching the process of political empowerment as involving a combination of different elements or types of activities, including: mobilisation of people to form groups; awareness raising about rights and how people can analyse and influence the situation they are in; ways to actively participate in decision-making; strengthen the internal organisation of citizen groups and tools and methods for action.