Advocacy

Advocacy, as practiced by NGOs is the righting of unequal power relations. Underpinning this shift is the realisation that ‘projects’ alone are not going to overcome long term poverty, but that greater democracy, transparency and the work of civil society to hold governments, corporations, local multinational institutions and other key decision makers accountable are more likely to achieve long term sustainable changes.

Realizing that national and international policies as well as commercial market forces often undermine sustainable development efforts and restrict people at the grass-roots level from participate in public or private policy decisions, NGOs have come to mobilize, articulate and represent people's interests or concerns at different levels of decision-making: locally, nationally and internationally.

Raising Africa provides support to networks and coalitions at national and district level to enable them to develop and implement clear advocacy strategies. Raising Africa allocates resources for advocacy in each of its sectors at national level to proactively handle national issues as they emerge.  Once the issues have been identified, comprehensive research is conducted prior to implementing all advocacy campaigns.  In all this Raising Africa aims to influence policy development and practices at local and national levels which will have a sustainable positive effect on the lives of the extreme poor. This it does through some of the following strategic interventions:

• Grass root empowerment in advocacy and human rights awareness

• Facilitation of community engagement with policy and service providers

• Joint Research and advocacy with other development partners

• Learning, documentation and information sharing

• Policy advocacy holding  government accountable to its policy framework

• Conflict prevention and peace building

• Budget advocacy

• Identify and support national level advocacy partners and link them with local partners for synergy and to strengthen advocacy work informed by grassroots interventions of our partners.

• Develop staff and partners’ capacity in research, policy influencing, development and analysis.

• Conduct research to undertake an informed advocacy agenda and develop an understanding on policy formulation process within the country.

• Provide technical support, properly guide the partners in planning and developing monitoring indicators to execute their specific advocacy agendas in order to maximize success and where possible solicit for support from Raising Africa’s Advocacy unit.

• Facilitate the establishment of an advocacy working group with national level partners to continuously advise and assist on the roll out of the advocacy agendas in a more pragmatic manner.

• Identify and support relevant networks, coalitions and sector working groups that Raising Africa should be represented at for each advocacy issue in exchange of information, learning and policy influencing.

• Continuously link our national advocacy to regional and international advocacy agenda.