The Association for the Promotion of Women in Romania (APoWeR)

The program responds to a need for practical information and procedures for women in disadvantaged situations. The purpose of the training is for women in disadvantaged situations to have information that concerns reproductive health and rights, institutions they can address. It also focuses on exchanges within the group and the work on finding ideas for their personal or community development. The training gives information concerning hygiene, infections, sexual contact, pregnancy, medical services and procedures of benefiting of them, children’s development; equal opportunities, discrimination – labor rights, prostitution, domestic violence, balancing family and career.

The activities refer to knowledge on women’s rights, legislation, methods of self help in situations of rights violation. The women are taught how to proceed and to interact with official institutions and within the group. They also learn some health status self monitoring.

• Women from rural areas of Timis County
• The age group refers to women over 18 years old in disadvantaged social, economical situation.
• Each training group is composed of no more than 10-15 members

a. Provide knowledge on sexual health and women’s rights.

b. Promote independent acting regarding own health and rights.

c. Provide practical instruments of defending own rights and procedures of maintaining health status.

The training is held by specialists in the area of women’s rights and medical field. It uses methods related to work in the entire group and not so much on working at home. There are some basic topics on which are available presentations combined with practical exercises where they have to prove they understood the information received. For the teamwork, cooperation aspects involve exercises especially integrated in the training. The learning methodology is based on demonstration, explanation, imitating, discovering, developing in a group, developing individually and it involves group work, presentation, exercises and case studies. The training strategy was based on identification of resource persons of the community that participated in training in order to be able to transmit information to others as well.

The methodology used for the project consists of workshops, debates, thematic discussions and presentations. The topics used to be evaluated are institutional knowledge at a micro level, communication, expression, orientation towards change and participating in community with others. The evaluation tools chosen are the attitude scale, the observation, group discussion, self assessment pre-testing.

At the end of the training sessions the beneficiaries proved a satisfactory level of knowledge regarding reproductive health, women’s rights and institutions they can address. Evaluation results show a better level of self assessment regarding institutional knowledge, communication and expression. Significantly achievements observed after the training refer to willingness to participate in community with others and positive orientation towards change. These results are reflected also by the attitude scale which shows that beneficiaries improved their attitude towards change and co-participation as well as towards positive communication and expression.