A day in the life of an advocacy accompanier

As an Advocacy Accompanier, I probably have one of the strangest named, but most interesting jobs in CAFOD. I support CAFOD’s partners to do advocacy on issues like children’s rights, economic justice, land grabs, extra-judicial killings and climate change and in the last year I’ve worked in six different countries. But how can you be an expert on so many different places and issues, my friends often ask me? The short answer is that I’m not. And nor do I need to be. The local organisations on the ground have a wealth of knowledge gained from the work that they do every day that is different from mine. My role is to support them think through the how of advocacy and together we grapple with questions such as: How can you make sure that your land grabs report lands you in the Minister’s office and not in jail? How can make the public buzz about budgets? Why would a sceptical politician choose to attend Stakeholder Dialogue meeting at your community centre and not steak barbecue lunch at the 5* hotel corporate lobbying fest ? I ask these questions because effective advocacy always requires a strategy: it’s not enough to be passionate about a cause, to publish a lengthy report or spend your time convincing those who already agree with you.

The kind of support I give varies: workshop facilitator, mentor, critical friend, sounding board, or researcher – everyone has different needs so there is no one size fits all approach to this job! Perhaps it would be a lot less work and cheaper to run a generic advocacy course in order to disseminate a CAFOD approach to advocacy. However, I suspect that this would be ineffective, out of touch with local reality and risky in the long-run.

So, why this word accompaniment in my job title?

Counting women to make women count

Image from http://fuzzjunk.blogspot.co.uk/

Monitoring and evaluating the impact and reach of advocacy and governance programmes is difficult at the best of times. However, trying to disaggregate what available data there is according to sex can be even more challenging.

A growing number of INGOs and donors are asking their local partners to provide sex-disaggregated data.  So, seeing as how it’s International Women’s Day, now seems as good a time as any to examine the value of breaking data down in this way. What does it actually tell us? Or, more to the point, what are we hoping to find out by doing this?

Personally, I think the value in collecting sex-disaggregated data about a project is that it provides us with the means to ensure there are no barriers to people participating in or deriving benefit from the project on the basis of their gender. That shouldn’t require that there be equal participation of both men and women in every project, of course- that depends on the project and what it is trying to achieve.

In the context of governance programmes this is particularly relevant because women and girls are a commonly marginalised social group, often excluded from decision-making processes which affect their lives. On this basis, I think there are two main questions we would generally want to find out about a governance/advocacy programme:

• How are women and men participating/included in the programme?
• How are men and women impacted differently by the programme (positively and negatively)?

So, how difficult is this?

Post-2015 leadership: what does it look like?

There’s an African proverb often repeated in conversations on multilateralism: ‘If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.’ Like most clichés, it’s over-used because it’s at once true and not yet reflected in international politics.

Neil Palmer, CIAT International Center for Tropical Agriculture – global partnership

MDG7 (environmental sustainability) and MDG8 (global partnership) are different from the other six goals, tackling as they do sustainability and systemic barriers to development, rather focusing on poverty, health, education and equality. MDGs 7 and 8 are the goals that require all nations to participate in the journey towards equitable, sustainable, inclusive development.

Are policy wonks in NGOs a good thing?

Definition: a person who takes an obsessive interest in the minor detail of policy

The etymology of the term wonk is a derogatory one used to refer to geeks, but it sometimes seems nowadays to be a badge of honour within development circles.  Undoubtedly we need wonks in the world, including development wonks, but are NGOs the right place for people to indulge any wonkish tendencies?

I’m not sure they are for three reasons:

1)      Most NGOs even sizeable ones like CAFOD have relatively few policy or research staff.  We can’t afford to have people who get too immersed in the detail even if those we are trying to influence have hoards of experts.  We are not an academic institution, we are an NGO – the two things should not be confused, although of course we work closely with academia, and I am not arguing that academia is full of wonks (oh dear have to be careful here)!

2)      The purpose of NGO policy and research is to make a difference to the lives of people living in poverty.  By working with our partners we have direct access to those people and our added value and indeed primary duty is to bring their experiences and voices into the policy debate and corridors of power – to show how policies and practices impact their lives and what change is needed as a result.

3)      People who are too immersed in the detail can fail to see the bigger picture.  At CAFOD we believe that it is not just policy that can be at fault but the values, the principles and the beliefs that inform that policy.  Our deep and living roots in the Catholic faith mean we take seriously Catholic Social Teaching and Gospel Values in informing our policy and advocacy work and we have an excellent Theology team who helps us to do this. And we believe there is a fundamental shift in worldview that is needed by those in power.  Most other NGOs I know have a strong sense of values and principles that inform their work whether that be a Rights Based Approach or an implicit belief system.

I hope I haven’t stirred up a hornet’s nest.  Views and comments as ever are welcome, particularly from self-confessed wonks.

Thinking small on the food crisis will bring big benefits

Two weeks ago I wrote a blog emphasising the need to ‘think small’ as a response to the food crisis. Since then we’ve seen the price of cereals sky-rocketing, the UK holding a ‘Global Hunger Event’ and big business announcing their pleasure in the potential profits that can be made out of such a crisis. 

G20 leaders are making it clear they are deeply concerned by the potential of another food crisis in the wake of recent price hikes. They had planned to hold a tele-conference this week to discuss whether an emergency meeting will be called in late September or early October. According to the Financial Times, “the meeting would be the first of the Rapid Response Forum, a newly created body to ‘promote early discussion among decision-level officials about abnormal international market conditions’ ”. The Vatican  and President Lee Myungbak of Korea are amongst those who have called on the G20 to hold such an emergency meeting and respond to this issue as a matter of urgency.

With mounting pressure on the G20 to respond to the crisis it would be easy to forget that attempts to stabilise food security in the past has repeatedly failed the world’s poorest by refusing to tackle the underlying factors determining who goes hungry as a result of these spikes.

The golden thread of development: spinning a yarn?

Matthew Taylor’s latest excellent blog has helped crystallised for me what troubles me about David Cameron’s golden thread of development.  In case you are coming to this new; the golden thread is the government’s take on the essential ingredients (apologies for mixed metaphors) for successful development.   These are individual rights, transparency and private sector growth.  Whilst we would agree that all three are good and very important, they do represent a somewhat one dimensional view that is in danger of reinforcing an individualistic approach to development. 

But why does this represent an individualistic approach? The philosophical basis seems to be that we need to have less barriers, more openness, more entrepreneurship. By itself this represents a negative view of freedom – that left to their own devices with the information they need – people will be free to realise their potential.  The absence of interference whether from the state or others is based on a particular understanding of the way markets should function. But, of course freedom without purpose or without limits is problematic as the banking crisis demonstrates and I am sure the Prime Minister would agree.   As Taylor argues for all its strengths the flipside of individualism is selfishness.

Taylor believes that social justice needs to be held as a limit to individualism particularly in societies which are highly unequal.  Catholic Social Teaching would agree on the need for a balance between the rights of individuals and the need for social justice, but it would also contend that each agent or actor should be oriented towards a clear common purpose or telos otherwise we are in danger of perpetuating unfreedom for some or even the many.  So forgive me for probably stretching the metaphor a bit too far, but if the golden thread is not the right one the whole jumper may unravel.

Celebrations for South Sudan? (part 2)

So what does the second year of life of the new nation of South Sudan hold in store?

Celebrations for South Sudan?

 

July 9^th 2012 will be the first birthday of the global family’s newest nation, the Republic of South Sudan. But what kind of party will they be having? Is there reason to have any party at all?

Solidarity and the City: advocacy and the self

March for housing dignity in Sao Paulo

I’m waiting by the Teatro Municipal  in the centre of Sao Paulo where 2000 families are waiting with banners unfurled. An atmosphere of calm expectation and quiet fortitude is in the air. The families come from all over the city, from occupations in the centre, houses in flood-risk zones, self-built settlements on the periphery, and social housing tenements. Some will have risen before dawn to reach here, balanced on crowded buses for two or three hours or more. Many will have forgone a day’s wages from their washing, selling and cleaning jobs. All ages – from the very young to the old are present, with women outnumbering men by about two to one. They are from Sao Paulo’s housing movements and they are here to march for the right to decent housing.

View from the ground: Liberia elections

By Flickr user Multimedia Photography and Design- Newhouse School

Tuesday saw run-off elections in Liberia between the incumbent Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf (United Party, UP) and opposition candidate Winston Tubman (Congress for Democratic Change, CDC). 

However, Tubman called for a public boycott of the election claiming that the first round had been fraudulant. A protest organised outside the party’s headquarters on the eve of the elections descended into violence and resulted in a number of deaths, with sporadic violence continuing into election day.

The question on everyone’s lips is ‘What does this mean for Liberia?’  At worst, the election result could be violently contested and at best the winner is unlikely to be universally accepted, making governing very challenging.

David Konneh, Executive Director of CAFOD partner Don Bosco Homes  lives in Monrovia and shared with us some of his reflections of what things have been like on the ground over the last few days…

On Monday I was trying to get to the ECOWAS building to pick up my brown card, to travel to  Sierra Leone. The office is just  two minutes from Madam Sirleaf and the opposition CDC headquarters.  As I drove up I heard shooting and then saw teargas everywhere. I had to reverse quickly and didn’t know what to do. I saw young people confronting the police  and I was scared. I didn’t want to stay in my car, for fear that I might be dragged out and the vehicle set alight.

I jumped out of the car, and hid behind it, as I crouched on the ground, I heard the voice of a woman calling me into her house.  ‘Come inside, come inside, be quick’, she called. I dashed into her home and from her window both of us scared watched what was unfolding in front of us. My eyes hadn’t escaped the sting of teargas, and  they started to smart. My befriender, gave me potato leaves to put on my eyes, she swore that this old remedy would  work and after sometime sure enough the smarting  became less. With my eyes a little better I called my office and told my staff to stay put and not to leave until things were calmer.