"CARE Australia hosted a five-day visual storytelling workshop in May 2013 with programming and partner staff from Ethiopia, Malawi and Tanzania within a food security program funded by AusAID. The program’s goal was “to improve the quality of life for chronically food insecure rural women... in areas experiencing chronic food insecurity resulting from changing and erratic weather patterns, limited agricultural resources and inputs, and where institutions, practices and norms disadvantage and limit the participation and opportunities of women, especially single and widowed women” (CARE 2011: 1). The workshop focused in particular on determining how to incorporate visual storytelling into qualitative monitoring and evaluation (M&E) activities for the five-year program, as well as to support women’s empowerment efforts. Because the visual storytelling methodology builds on the belief that empowerment is strengthened by people constructing their own knowledge through a process of dialog, reflection and action, it was important the method fit each country’s context, staff capacity, implementation modality and women’s empowerment processes. Thus the workshop was designed using a train-the-trainer approach whereby a visual storytelling facilitator not only built staff capacity in photography composition and ethics, basic photo storytelling and community digital storytelling (CDST), but incorporated space for on-going dialog about how each country team could use the visual methods to support women’s empowerment, M&E and advocacy. Such flexibility and collaboration in using the method, rather than a more common approach where the specific application or topic is pre-designed by a visual storytelling facilitator or the donor, allowed for context-specific uses designed by those working directly with community members. As well, they recognized that the photo stories and CDST videos – with the permission of the storytellers – have value as communications products for wider dissemination. As such, the teams discussed the importance of ensuring that the people telling their stories and those in the photographs understand such use and give their informed consent (or parental consent when working with children)." (Page 26)