The Faithful House: Challenging Gender Norms to Reduce Multiple and Concurrent Partnerships. 2010

Published by the Catholic Relief Services 2010

Written by Dr. Dorothy Brewster-Lee, Adele Clark, Mitiku Telilla

This paper describes results from pre- and postworkshop evaluations that explored what attitude and behavior differences occurred from participation in the Faithful House program and how men and women differed in reported changes. Background: The Faithful House (TFH) is a curriculum that encourages couples to “Be Faithful” by challenging social and cultural gender norms and building skills in interpersonal communication. From 2007 to 2009, Catholic Relief Services (CRS)-Ethiopia trained 1,618 people using TFH; in turn, they reached 8,542 other couples with the curriculum. Conclusions: Though these differences of age and education remain static in the marriage, the training was nevertheless able to positively influence other culturally determined values such as finances, childcare responsibilities, and communication.

Download this document here (PDF, 720.34KB, 8pg)