This course is designed for people and organisations grappling with issues of power, politics and exclusion. It goes beyond the first generation of advocacy training to delve more deeply into questions of citizenship, constituency building, social change, gender and accountability.
This course is based on the manual A New Weave of Power, People & Politics: The Action Guide to Advocacy and Citizen Participation by Lisa VeneKlasen and Valerie Miller of Just Associates. The course is one of an integrated collection of courses developed by Fahamu in conjunction with the University of Oxford.
The course’s approach to advocacy is geared to improving the lives and participation of marginalised people and forging broad alliances for reform across society, which the course defines as citizen-centred advocacy, sometimes referred to as transformative, people-centred, participatory, or social justice advocacy.
Advocacy is understood as a political process that involves the coordinated efforts of people in changing existing practices, ideas, and distributions of power and resources that exclude women and other disadvantaged groups. From this perspective, advocacy deals with specific aspects of policy-making, as well as the values and behaviour that perpetuate exclusion and subordination. Thus, advocacy is both about changing specific decisions affecting people’s lives and changing the way decision-making happens into a more inclusive and democratic process.
Inevitably, advocacy will involve tensions. This course aims to help activists analyse, plan and manage strategies with a clear understanding of potential risks. Advocacy strategies will vary widely in response to particular circumstances, issues, opportunities and constraints.
The course builds on experiences in advocacy, gender, human rights, popular education and social change. It contains a variety of exercises, tools, resources, tips and stories which make learning exciting.
Course content
1 Understanding politics
- Action for change
- Advocacy, politics and rights
- Democracy and citizenship
- Power and empowerment
- Constructing empowering strategies.
2 Planning advocacy
- Planning for advocacy
- Looking inward
- Understanding the big picture
- Identifying and defining problems
- Analysing problems and priorities
- Mapping advocacy strategies
- Finding policy hooks
- Forces, friends and foes.
3 Doing advocacy
- Messages and media
- Lobbying and negotiating
- Alliances and coalitions.
By the end of the course:
Participants will:
- Understand the key concepts, assumptions and values related to politics, democracy, citizenship rights and power
- Have a deeper understanding of how to integrate education for active citizenship into human rights advocacy
- Be able to work with a variety of tools and frameworks for advocacy planning
- Be able to apply a variety of frameworks to analyse how macro trends, forces and institutions shape concrete problems as well as the opportunities and barriers for addressing them
- Understand the different factors they need to consider in making strategic choices, and building advocacy efforts ranging from framing and creating messages to negotiating with opponents.
Course benefits
Every participant will be provided with course materials including a course CDROM, which contains a comprehensive library of all relevant declarations, conventions and documents, as well as useful website addresses. A resources section on the CDROM provides a glossary of frequently used terms, a list of recommended books, copies of documents, links to relevant websites and other useful resources.
On successful completion of the course, participants receive a certificate from the University of Oxford and Fahamu.
Audience
The course is designed for:
- Non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and grassroots groups interested in a rights-based approach to advocacy that combines policy influence activities with strategies to strengthen citizen participation, awareness, and organisation
- Donor institutions interested in supporting comprehensive advocacy programmes that focus on overcoming exclusion and subordination, as well as on building more democratic forms of public decision-making
- Development agencies interested in engaging their own service delivery structures and beneficiaries in the pursuit of development solutions through the political process
- Trainers, activists, organisers, and researchers interested in building bridges between civil society, government, business and other influential people and institutions to promote more accountable political processes and responsive development policies.
Course length
2 weeks (currently only available as a residential course)
Tuition fee
Contact:
How to apply
I nformation on how to apply for a Fahamu course .