Think back to your journey as a student, mulling through lengthy textbooks. How did it feel reading the textbook quietly on your own? How did that experience differ while reading under the guidance of your favorite teacher, who supplemented the material with dynamic activities, answered your questions, made connections to the material that resonated with your context, and provided a safe space for you to discuss with your classmates?
A school textbook is only as good as the quality of its active use by skilled teachers in the classroom. Similarly, the effectiveness of methodologies used to reshape gendered social norms transcend a methodology downloaded from a website. The inanimate written text of a manual comes to life through an intentional process sustained by training and mentorship, trusted facilitators and an intimate understanding of the context in which it is developed and used. The qualities of who these actors are, how they perform and the resources available to them, have a critical effect on the transformative potential that can take place.
We are a thought-collective of organizations using practice-based learning to inspire conversations and influence action on ethical, effective scaling of gender-transformative social norms change programming. Our Community for Understanding Scaling Processes (CUSP) has spent the past eight years advocating to various stakeholders to pay attention to the complex processes underlying the scaling of gender-transformative social norms change. Expedited programming that overlooks these processes may not only fall short of its transformative potential, but in the most severe instances, can create harm for women and communities.
In our latest article, The Ethics of Knowledge Sharing: A feminist examination of intellectual property rights and open-source materials in gender transformative methodologies, we analyze how gender-transformative methodologies are shared, distributed and altered for expansion and growth. We examine the origins and modern use of intellectual property rights (IPR) and the open-source movement, attempting to reconcile the feminist values underlying our methodologies within an ecosystem shaped by (neo)colonial practices and a profit-over-people mindset.
We trace the evolution of and contradictions with IPR. While IPR has protected creators and industries, it has also led to massive exploitation that has withheld critical access to life-saving medicine, undermined and commercially exploited Indigenous wisdom, and built a set of one-size-fits-all rules that primarily serve the interests of the West.
Similarly, our experiences have been mixed based on the funding requirements and types of organizations through which we work. Ideally, ethical usage of CUSP methodologies– fidelity to their principles and structure, doing no harm in communities and engaging the originators– would be the norm. However, some CUSP members have found that their materials have been used by others in ways that undermine quality programming and respect for our intellectual and emotional labor. For example, a USAID-funded implementation of Stepping Stones counseled adolescent girls and young women on how to alter their behavior with their male partners, rather than shift harmful gender norms. As one young female participant stated: “You should keep quiet if he tells you to do something you should just accept, you should not compete with him.” This work was framed as an adaptation of Stepping Stones, despite not consulting Salamander Trust and violating fundamental elements of the original program.
The advent of AI has taken communications technology one step further, leading to more questions with which the open source movement must grapple. The companies who created ChatGPT have freely harvested copyright material from thousands of websites, book authors, social media and other widely available sources without any notification, acknowledgement, or remuneration to source creators. Moreover, these systems and their creators are scraping content in a way that augments existing gender-inequitable and racialized biases and reinforces a knowledge hierarchy with the Global North at the top.
On the other hand, the open-source movement surfaced in part due to the limitations of intellectual property, as well as a desire for a more democratic form of knowledge production. CUSP has had different experiences in the level of “openness” of our approaches, but the principle of ‘open source’ aligns with our feminist ethics, honoring our belief in the feminist principle that our work is in service of others. IRH’s open access to the Gender Roles, Equality and Transformation (GREAT) methodology has generated valuable contributions, including integration of standard approaches to working with fathers to prevent violence against children, and incorporation of age-appropriate gender-transformative approaches into children’s clubs. However, we have also seen our methodologies used in ways that lacked attribution and caused harm to women and communities. Tostan has not made its Community Empowerment Program public due to frequent revisions based on community feedback and past misuse, including selective extraction of sessions and reduced time for training facilitators. Raising Voices initially made all material open source, but after the success of the SASA! methodology’s randomized controlled trial, with subsequent interest ballooning, many adaptations circulated using its name and logo without maintaining fidelity to its core components. In Southern Africa, a bilateral donor funded an initiative that reduced SASA!’s three-year community mobilization process into a two-week training workshop.
Just like the favorite teacher who brought the textbook material to life through an interactive curriculum, gender-transformative methodologies require intentional planning, deliberation and contextual background. When we turn to existing infrastructure on supporting grounded adaptations and ethical implementation of our methodologies, we find that neither provides an enabling environment: the current IPR system is primarily intended for profit-seekers in competitive industries, while the principles of open source can undermine the gender- transformative goals of the methodologies. The rigidity of IPR does not enable the collaborative processes we had envisioned for this work and an open-source environment can lead to misuse, risking increased rates of violence, intensified vulnerability, and more.
Many of our methodologies entail a process of deep learning and/or unlearning. Just as we encourage others to reconsider the attitudes, beliefs and practices that have been so deeply held, we challenge ourselves and others to apply a feminist lens to intellectual property and open source, aiming to transform norms where safety, collaboration, and creative integrity are the standard. If you’re interested in learning more and reading our key recommendations for donors, INGOs and IDCS, and researchers, check out our article here.
You can read more about CUSP’s work here.
Written by Community for Understanding Scaling Processes (CUSP).
