Rapid Assessment of the "Stories Without an Ending" Technique

"SWE is a method that involves everyone. With these stories we are involved, consulted and active, from start to finish. We are actors of our own development. Nobody imposes positions on us. The stories encourage us to unite, reflect and discuss our problems. So we prefer Stories Without An Ending." - young girl in Sare Yira

The non-governmental organisation (NGO) Grandmother Project (GMP) - Change through Culture has been working to support the development and rights of young girls in the Vélingara department, in the south of Senegal, since 2008. GMP's Girls' Holistic Development (GHD) programme aims to enhance transmission of positive cultural values, improve communication between generations, and change community social norms concerning: girls' school attendance, child marriage and teen pregnancy, and female genital mutilation (FGM). One tool GMP uses in its activities to catalyse dialogue for consensus-building for change among community actors is Stories-Without-an-Ending (SWE). This approach is consistent with the characteristics of African collectivist societies, which value group discussion that can lead to collective change in communities. This report presents the results of a study conducted in Nemataba Commune, which is in the Kolda Region in southern Senegal. Its purpose was to understand community actors' attitudes toward this communication and education tool, and to gather their thoughts on its effects on community members' relationships and attitudes toward GHD.

The SWE approach (to learn more, see Related Summaries, below) was developed in 1994 by Dr. Judi Aubel, Executive Director of GMP, to catalyse community discussion on existing attitudes and practices and on new ideas shared with them. This methodology is based, on the one hand, on adult education principles like Paulo Freire's dialogical approach (1970), and on the other hand, on the values and collective learning process that characterise collectivist societies.

SWE are based on real situations and problems experienced in communities' daily life. The characters in the stories support opposing ideas on a given problem, and the questions that accompany each story encourage participants to reflect on different ways of perceiving and understanding a problem. GMP has developed a series of SWEs on different GHD topics. These stories are used with groups of women and men across the three generations, but especially by mothers, grandmothers, and young girls, who are identified as priority groups.

To understand community experience with and attitudes toward the SWE approach and its effects at the community level, GMP staff conducted 85 in-depth interviews grandmothers, women of childbearing age, adolescents, and prominent citizens in 7 villages in the Nemataba district where the GHD programme has existed since 2017 and where SWEs have been used in several types of activities.

In short, the results of the interviews show that all interviewees see SWE favourably as encouraging reflection and change within communities on topics that concern them. Below are the main conclusions based on the results of the community interviews:

• According to community members, the SWE support collective reflection on topics that were considered taboo or just not discussed in the past, such as: teen pregnancy, child marriage, or FGM. They all say that the SWE catalyse the collective search for strategies to tackle such problems.
• SWE strengthen dialogue and community understanding: According to the interviewees, SWE encourage reflection and help community members express themselves freely. In this way, they promote dialogue and community understanding, which facilitates the resolution of problems.
• SWE are interesting and stimulating for the participants because they reflect community realities and the concrete problems they experience: All community actors agree that SWE help communities to search for solutions to problems they face. The fact that they are based on real community situations and problems motivates community members to engage in discussion of those problems and of possible solutions.
• Communities say they prefer the SWE approach to the more directive education/communication approaches used by some organisations: The interviewees expressed appreciation for the SWE approach because it is participatory and because it values the ideas of all participants in the group. They value this approach, especially when compared to the approaches used by other programmes that try to "impose" development workers' ideas on the community.
• SWE contribute to changes in attitudes: According to the interviewees, SWE contributed - along with the other communication and education activities implemented with the communities - to changing their attitudes on child marriage, teen pregnancy, FGM, and formal education for girls.
• Discussion of the topics presented in the stories continues after the sessions: According to interviewees, after the sessions, participants (of both sexes and all three generations) often continue the discussion in the family and community, in order to find solutions to the problems presented in the SWE. This effect of the stories promotes communication about topics addressed in the SWE in the wider community context. As a grandmother in Bagayoko said, "No one has a monopoly on knowledge, and with the discussion of these open-ended stories everyone can contribute something to tackling the problems they describe. We do not necessarily have the same views but we must try to identify ideas that are acceptable to the whole community. And everyone is encouraged to continue the reflection when they are back home, for a wider reach."

In conclusion, the study found that SWE encourage "collective dialogue within communities and in harmony with the collectivist values of African societies they foster collective processes of learning and change....[A]n approach to communication and education that involves the whole community, and which is based on respect, valuing knowledge and local realities, contributes to initiating a process of consensual change in community attitudes and social norms."

This study was made possible thanks to a grant from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID)-funded Passages Project Cooperative Agreement.

Click here for the report in French (21 pages, PDF).