Details

Case

To Play Or Not To Play: Shirkat Gah Women Resource Centre

Farzad R Khan

INDUSTRY : NGO Management

AREA : HRM/OB

ORGANIZATION : Shirkat Gah Women Resource Center

LENGTH : 16

LUMS No : 05-742-2010-1

PUBLICATION YEAR : 2010

KEYWORDS:

Shirkat Gah,Women Resource Centre,Awareness,Health Care,Communication,Human Rights,Secular Humanism,Islam

DESCRIPTION:

This case deals with the question of using a street play as an advocacy tool for raising awareness about Westernized and secular notions of women¿s reproductive health care rights in rural areas of Pakistan. The immediate issue is whether Mohammad Aslam should use a street play called Nadia¿s Story as a means of communicating women¿s reproductive health care rights to a skeptical village audience in a North Eastern village of Punjab that views his organisation, Shirkat Gah, as representing anti-Islamic and Westernizing forces. The concepts involved in this case deal with street theatre, postcolonial conditions, human rights advocacy based on Western notions of secular humanism, and Islam.

LEARNING OBJECTIVES:

This case was primarily written for an advocacy training programme for NGO managers and field workers. It can also be taught in a social enterprise management MBA course in a class looking at exposing students to anti-NGO sentiments amongst the Pakistani Public and the challenges they pose to NGO interventions. The case's ostensible pedagogical purpose is to make students aware of street theatre as a potential tool of advocacy, and debate its appropriateness for a Pakistani context. The case is also to be used to make NGO managers reflect on the fact that the values they hold to be universal are in fact not universal at all. (Women's reproductive health care rights)

SUBJECTS COVERED:

Human Resource Management, Organizational Behaviour