Grassroots leadership in the Network of Healthy Communities in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil: a gender perspective

Based on ethnographic research conducted with the Network of Healthy Communities in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, this article examines how grassroots leaders have sought networks and partnerships as a strategy to amplify and strengthen their work, particularly through the exchange of information. It provides a gender analysis of activists’ work, leadership styles, motivations, mobilisation strategies, and difficulties. The study concludes that the politicisation of motherhood is critical for women's emergence as leaders, as well as for creating the necessary conditions for work in communities dominated by drug lords. Rather than reinforcing traditional gender conceptions, activism revises gender relations and identities. Health policies should include grassroots leaders, and invest in their potential for community health promotion, so that family and community medicine programmes can benefit from working with activists and using their strategies.