The intervention was developed during the months of November and December 2014 and involved the implementation of 10 Social and Community Theatre workshops with the following groups:

• 4 groups of secondary school female students;
• 2 groups of secondary school teachers;
• 1 group of women selected from the community;
• 1 mixed group of community members;
• 1 group of local trainers.

The intervention was conducted through social theatre workshops. In the first phase, each group worked on cross-cutting themes such as body awareness, non-verbal language, the body-emotion connection, relationships (in pairs and in groups), trust in relationships, and creativity.

The second part of each intervention was tailored to the specific needs of each group in order to address their unique themes.

The theatrical workshops with the female students, although brief, were useful for a first encounter with the local culture and understanding the characteristics of children and adolescents. What emerged was indispensable for structuring the subsequent teacher training.

In the workshops with the teachers, the themes addressed were: critical learning beyond rote memorization; the use of creativity as a valuable tool for both teachers and students; body and environmental awareness, and understanding student needs.

For the workshop with the women, the macro objective of the program was to bring out the condition of women in Wuchale from the participants and to trigger a process of sharing and empowerment within the group. The emergence of themes was facilitated by theatrical exercises that encourage the narration of personal experiences through bodily representations. This type of language was chosen both for the immediacy of communication and to avoid excessive verbal and translation exchanges between the group and the facilitator.

The workshop with men and women from the community involved people who hold relevant roles within the community. The main themes of the workshop were community issues and discrimination against women. The aim of the workshop was to bring these issues to light and then guide the group through a process of sharing and empowerment.

The training of trainers aimed to raise awareness and responsibility among key people within the community regarding the importance of active participation by all subjects, with particular attention to the female component, in a process of development and growth of the territory.

A moment of sharing with the local community was organized at the end of the project, where the intervention was presented through a video projection. The video documented the themes that emerged from the workshops and the participants’ experiences. Subsequently, the video was distributed in schools and throughout the community as a document for outreach and raising awareness on the topic of the female condition in the area.

Quantitative results:

• 200 people including girls, adolescents, adult women, and adult men directly involved in the workshops;
• approximately 100 people present at the final event;
• 9 people with roles of responsibility and training within the Wuchale community participated in the training of trainers and will in turn train people from the community;
• the main indirect beneficiaries of the intervention were the members of IFSO (6 people) who collaborated in the implementation of the project and were thus able to benefit from on-the-job training.

Qualitative results: The Social and Community Theatre methodology was completely unknown to the people of Wuchale. They were offered an innovative training, far from their usual practices. The impact on the groups was very strong. In particular, the elements of the methodology that sparked interest among local trainers and yielded good results with the groups were:

• a different setting from traditional frontal teaching;
• learning through experience;
• the importance of concentration for the quality of work;
• the deepening of one’s relational skills;
• the importance of non-verbal language;
• freedom of expression, the possibility of communicating and representing one’s emotions in a protected setting;
• sharing specific issues within a group;
• the group as a place of learning and discussion;
• integrated work between men and women;
• the use of creativity for learning purposes.

The interviews collected at the end of the paths highlighted that a real process of change was triggered in the participants. They showed that they had internalized what they had experienced during the workshop experience and expressed the desire to further explore the topics addressed, recognizing the usefulness of this new awareness in their daily lives. Following the positive outcomes of the intervention in Wuchale, the collaboration between SCT Centre, CIFA, and IFSO has planned two other distinct actions. The first concerns the Wuchale territory, where a two-year project has been activated, expanding the model already proposed in 2014. The second involved sharing the Social and Community Theatre intervention model with Wollo University in Dessie.