1 Community Empowerment
Community systems strengthening is a mechanism to ensure meaningful participation of communityled organizations within the wider policy and programmatic systems of the state, and to address and resolve internal issues and conflicts. At the local level, this means sex worker organizations and networks participate as members on planning, funding and implementation committees and other relevant bodies, ensuring that the needs of the sex worker community are addressed. It may also mean that within a sex worker organization, or across a number of organizations, community-led structures are put in place to monitor, decide upon or otherwise address key issues of concern to the community. These may include violence-reduction strategies, allocation of community housing or functioning of community financial cooperatives.
Box 1.6
Strengthening management and organizational capacity
• Create a fair and transparent method for making decisions within the organization.
• Ensure that the process for carrying out and managing activities is participatory, transparent and has accountability.
• Establish a transparent operational system for managing human and financial resources.
• Sex workers should be in control of the planning, implementation and monitoring of the collective and its activities, including identifying indicators for monitoring.
• Support the growth of group membership and advancing of the group’ s goals and objectives.
• Encourage cooperation and learning from other sex worker-led organizations and networks nationally and internationally.
To help achieve sustainability, it is important to invest time and resources into building leadership among sex workers through their involvement in trainings, conferences, project design, implementation, evaluation, research and fundraising activities, and their participation in the wider sex worker rights movement.( See also Chapter 3, Section 3.2.2, part D.)
It is also essential to develop the organizational skills and capabilities of the collective as a whole. This may involve enhancing business and management skills among group members, strengthening leadership and management or developing resource mobilization activities( Box 1.7). The guidance of allies and partners, as well as other sex worker-led organizations, may assist with the process.
Box 1.7
Case example: Generating income as a collective
Enhancing business and management skills among group members may lead to income-generating activities for the collective:
• Sex workers from Ashodaya Samithi in Mysore, India used World Bank funding to start a restaurant staffed by sex workers, which helps challenge the stigma and discrimination they face. Profits support a home-care programme for sex workers living with HIV.
• In Brazil, the sex worker organization Davida created its own fashion line, Dapsu, whose proceeds help fund the organization’ s social, cultural and HIV prevention activities.
• In India, leaders of the Sonagachi Project registered a consumer cooperative to increase sex workers’ economic security through access to credit and savings programmes, handicraft production, condom social marketing and evening child-care centres.
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