Project Empower

In KwaZulu-Natal's informal settlements and rural communities, violence against women and HIV do not exist as separate problems. They are bound together — often perpetuating one another, always amplified by poverty and constrained choices. Project Empower was established in 2002 with the specific aim of understanding and disrupting these connections, grounding its work in both rigorous research and direct community engagement.

Based at the Diakonia Centre in Durban — home to many of KZN's most significant social justice organisations — Project Empower is led by Director Laura Washington and has worked with more than 100 community-based groups across KwaZulu-Natal, as well as in the Eastern Cape and Limpopo.

Community-Based Activism — Women's Groups in eThekwini and Ndumo

One of Project Empower's most significant accomplishments has been the formation and sustained support of community-based activist women's groups. Eight groups in eThekwini's informal settlements and six in the remote rural community of Ndumo — far in the north of KwaZulu-Natal, near the Mozambique border — organised, developed their own leadership, and successfully advocated for:

• Adequate women's health care at primary health care clinics
• Community policing forums that take violence against women seriously
• Women's representation and voice on local ward committees

This kind of community organising — supporting women to claim space and power in the very structures and services that most affect their lives — is one of the most durable and community-owned forms of GBV prevention.

Curricula Development — Creating Futures and Stepping Stones

In partnership with UKZN and the South African Medical Research Council (SAMRC), from 2011 to 2013 Project Empower developed and field-tested Creating Futures — a livelihoods curriculum designed to be used alongside the gender-transformative curriculum Stepping Stones with young people in informal settlements. Stepping Stones is an internationally recognised participatory programme that uses drama, role play, and group work to help young men and women examine the gender norms, communication patterns, and power dynamics that drive HIV transmission and violence.

Creating Futures was developed to address the gap that Stepping Stones alone could not fill: the structural reality that without livelihoods and economic alternatives, behaviour change alone is insufficient to protect young women. Together, the two curricula — addressing both the personal and the economic dimensions of vulnerability — represent a more complete intervention.

Research — HIV Risk, Violence, and Context

Project Empower's research programme investigates the contextual factors that shape HIV risk and violence for young men and women in South Africa, working in partnership with the SAMRC, UKZN, and University College London. Field sites have included informal settlements in eThekwini and a rural area in Jozini Municipality near Mozambique — chosen specifically to generate evidence that spans both urban informal and deeply rural contexts.

Supported by the Sexual Violence Research Initiative (SVRI), Project Empower has also worked with young women from informal settlements to deepen understanding of their agency in preventing violence in intimate partnerships, and to co-develop a violence prevention curriculum grounded in young women's own insights and strategies.

Project Empower: E310 Diakonia Centre, 20 Diakonia Avenue, Durban. Phone: +27 31 301 3581. Email: info@projectempower.org.za. NPO 021-763. Director: Laura Washington. Website: projectempower.org.za.