"Power Woman" in rural Zambia. Communicating to address and engage problems about charcoal use and child marriage.

A lot has been done in the past years to improve gender equality globally – operationssuch as UN Woman, the Sustainable Development Goals in Agenda 2030 and the workof many international non-governmental organizations. Nonetheless the world is stillfar from being gender equal. As of today, more women than men live in poverty, whichalso makes them more vulnerable to climate change. This degree project exploreswhat and how women in rural Zambia communicate to their community members tochange their behaviors concerning the use of charcoal and to prevent child marriages.Through the lens of communication for development and social change, thetheoretical framework was constructed with gender communication concepts and theDiffusion of Innovations theory. The material was collected during a minor field studyof three weeks in Zambia during March 2020. A qualitative study was conducted withsemi-structured interviews and field observations.The results from this study indicate that all the women communicated throughinterpersonal communication with different emphasis when speaking about childmarriage or charcoal use. When communicating about preventing child marriages, thefocus was mainly on the problems child marriages resulted in, while communicatingabout the options to charcoal the focus was rather on the positive outcomes. Inaddition, the women targeted the whole community when talking about childmarriage, while targeting primarily other women when communicating aboutsubstituting the use of charcoal with lamps and pellet stoves