>> The real focus is how do you do effective advocacy in a way that'll make a

difference with key audiences?

>> Welcome, in this course, you'll learn how to make your advocacy effective.
Effective advocacy is a necessary skill for leaders and staff members from
civil society to nongovernmental organizations.

Instructors Rakesh Rajani and Ruth Levine will teach you how to move forward
when the only solution involves persuading those around you. What do you do
when you need to convince other people to change their behavior or their
actions? Listen in to find out.
>> I'm Rakesh Rajani.
>> And I'm Ruth Levine.

>> And in this course, we will work with you to figure out how to do
effective advocacy.
>> We're the instructors for this course, and we are absolutely delighted to
have you join and participate in what we're expecting will be a stimulating
and informative set of the discussion.

>> Imagine that you live in a small city. For years, the water supply has
been unreliable, and a group of people have formed an organization to solve
this problem. They have collected information about the reliability of the
water supply, how much it costs, and they've also documented the many times
that the local and national officials have promised to improve water access.

But now they have to figure out, what do they do next? How are they gonna get
to the decision makers? How are they gonna change their minds and their
actions so that the water problem is solved? Have you or your organization
been in a similar challenge?
>> So who really uses advocacy and what forms can it take?

>> When we say non-governmental organization, civil society organization, or

NGO, we are talking about many, many different kinds and sizes of groups. For
example, an NGO might be an environmental organization that's trying to get
local community members to plant trees, or a parent-teacher organization
that's trying to bring parents together to make school improvements.

It might be a workers collective that's trying to place pressure on employers

to respect worker rights, or a group of people who are trying to get the
government to spend more money on key child health services.
>> And when we talk about advocacy, we also are referring to a range of
activities and tactics.

While some organizations may advocate through direct outreach to fellow

citizens in kinda one-on-one or small group discussion, others might take a
different approach. They might seek coverage of their cause through media and
newspaper, radio, television journalism. Advocacy can be highly visible. For
example, you'll see large scale campaigns with big billboards, huge TV
adverts and rallies, or it can be something much quieter, behind the scenes,
conversations with key decision makers and who influenced them.

In fact, as we'll see in our example later, almost everything that an NGO
does, other than the direct provision of services, ends up needing some kind
of advocacy in order to persuade others who are in important position to
think or behave or act in other ways that they would not on their own without
your intervention.

>> All of this will be broken down into six sessions. The first session will
explore how you can use this course to make yourself and your colleagues as
successful as possible. Ruth and Rakesh will dive into the political and
social context that advocacy takes place in. This session will introduce a
real example that a NGO might work on.

This example will be used repeatedly throughout the rest of the course.
Finally, they'll teach you how to identify a need for advocacy, and how to
build what's called the theory of change, starting with your aims and working
backwards to the steps you'll need to take to reach those goals.

At the end of this session, your assignment will be to apply the guidelines
of the theory of of change to create a clear organizational problem
statement. Throughout the session, please refer to the theory of change
visual on the course website.
>> Before we get started, perhaps you wanna know who we are, and what is the
experience we bring in advocacy?

So let me start with myself. I'm a Tanzanian and I've done most of my work in
East Africa. I've worked at three different NGOs to advance children's
rights, to improve access and quality of basic education, and to help make
governments more open and accountable to their citizens.
>> At every organization Rakesh was a part of, advocacy was a key part of
their strategy.

>> We help people in the organizations get better informed, better motivated,
and better organized to help them pressure governments make better decisions
and then implement those decisions. Some of the work we did was kinda loud
and public, some of what we did was quieter. Through this experience, we had
many successes and some failures too.

And over time, I hope I've learned to do better advocacy, and I hope to share
some of those lessons. I can tell you it's often not easy and there are no
magic solutions. But there are ways to think about this that can help make
advocacy more powerful.
>> I'm from the United States and I've done less on the ground advocacy work.

For most of my career, I've been involved in policy research to inform

decisions by government officials. The advocacy tactics that I've used have
mostly been trying to help get research into the hands of people who can use
it in government. And what I've done is mostly behind the scenes work,
building relationships with public officials, getting a sense of what the
questions are that they need answers to, building that credibility to be seen
as a useful source of information and knowledge for their decision making.

In that work, I have found ways to apply some public pressure so that the
government officials actually use the best available evidence for their
policy making.
>> Ruth currently works to fund research and advocacy efforts.
>> I've seen a wide variety of ways that organizations both succeed and
sometimes fail in their advocacy efforts.
So I'm hoping to bring that knowledge to bear and to help you in your work.
>> But now that you know a little bit about Ruth and myself, we can get going
onto the main topics for our first session.
>> We've called this first session, if advocacy is the answer, what's the
question?

Because the important place to start is not by saying we need an advocacy

strategy, but rather by defining the problem you're trying to solve. And the
problem isn't we don't have an advocacy strategy. Rather, the types of
problems we are talking about are at the heart of what an NGO's mission is.

We are not gonna take time to list every possible type of problem an NGO
might be working on, but let's talk about some of the most common. One is
behavior change. For example, some NGOs might be working to reduce the
prevalence of smoking, drug abuse, school dropout, HIV infection, and a host
of other ills that have at least some behavioral component.

Second is improving public services. Some NGOs work to improve the access to
and quality of services, health, schooling, that are provided by local or
national governments. Other NGOs might be working to safeguard common
resources. What I mean by this is that some NGOs work to reduce air and water
pollution, or deforestation, and other problems that come about when natural
resources are used in ways that fail to balance the public good with the
private interest.

Some NGOs work on governance challenges. They focus on shortcomings in the

way government institutions work. For instance, they might focus on rigged
elections, bribery, and other kinds of corruption. Still, other NGOs might
work on rights and opportunities. They might seek to protect the rights and
advance the well-being of groups that historically have been marginalized.

Whether that's ethnically, or religious minorities, they might work on gender

issues. They might work on a range of topics that have to do with exclusion
from political processes and economic opportunities.
>> Take a moment to think, how does your organization fit into this
categories? If it doesn't, how would you categorize the problem your
organization works on?

>> Most problems don't fall neatly into one category, and there are lots of
important interactions. So for example, if you think about the problem of HIV
prevalence, that's partly about behaviors, about whether people are using
condoms and having safe sex, but it's also about whether sex education is
provided by the schools and condoms are available through government
services.

So that has to do with different policy decisions. And if you draw that from
those immediate causes or determinants, you might see that the problems have
to do with marginalization, restricted opportunities. So keep this in mind,
because we're gonna come back to it when we work through the fury of change
in a few minutes.

>> So Ruth, we also need to be very clear about the context. Because while
these problems may be similar in different parts where we work, the context
will make a huge difference in terms of what you do to solve that problem.
Understanding of that context is crucial for us to orient ourselves in terms
of which is a right advocacy approach to use.

Each country, or city, or rural district, depending on where you work, has
its own history, its own politics, its own power relation, and its own kinda
distinct context. But in general, it's helpful to think about context in
terms of three different categories. Open, restrictive, and semi-open. So I'm
gonna start describing an open context.

How, in reality, fully open context are very rare, but it's useful to think
about what an open context is. It's one where I think doing advocacy work is
favorable in an open context government is characterized by a high degree of
transparency, they are not hiding things, they are open around how much money
they're getting, how they're spending the money, the budgets, expenditures.

And it also is open to encouraging citizens, people, to engage. Through

elections, for sure, but also ongoing ways of doing feedback in a day-to-day
basis. We're planning to spend this money, what do you think? This is how we
did. Does that make sense? In an open context, a wide range of points of view
can be expressed.

We can agree, we can disagree openly and in public. You can do that in media,
for example. You can be interviewed, you can write a letter to the editor.
And you're not afraid of retribution. You're not afraid that you'll be beaten
up because you're saying something that's critical, that disagrees with some
important person.

And in such an open context, NGOs are free to operate and do what they wanna
do. They can get funding. They can use it. They can express difference in
opinions. And, in fact, they are seen as a critical part of the check and
balances on power and government.

A government in an open system openly welcomes NGOs to kinda hold it to

account. And the truth is that in many countries of the world, you don't see
this openness. Whether you're looking at the global south or the global
north, things in fact are moving in the opposite direction.

Things are becoming more closed, you are seeing reversals of progress and so
in most of the world, it's much harder than what I've just described. So
let's look at what is a restrictive context? What does that look like? Well,
obviously, it doesn't have the kinda openness that we just discussed.

You may find that there's a kinda secretive central authority that can do
things, often nasty things, and get away with it. Or that the resources that
the government uses, I really used to benefit few people rather than public
as a whole. You may find that there are elections but the elections are not a
level playing field.

Not everyone has an equal chance of the systems don't have integrity or if
you think of day to day stuff such as how education and health and other
services work, you might find that people have very little chance to actually
give their opinion to say whether things are working or not.

And, in fact, if they complain they will face the consequences. You may find
that the media is not open, that there's censorship, and in fact, people talk
in hushed tones because they are afraid that if they speak openly and speak
critically, that something may happen to them. In this space, NGOs have a
hard time operating because they have to be very careful about what they say
and how they operate because there are many restrictions that they have to
worry about.

They might be closed down or their leaders might be someone to the police and
in some cases even imprisoned or beaten up. In such context, doing advocacy
requires you to be very careful in the way of the consequences of what you
might do. And finally, let's talk about the third context which as you can
imagine between closed and open, and in fact most countries fall in this
category.

What are the semi open contracts look like? Well, this is one way you will
find some level of transparency, there is some level of openness, it also
looks good on paper and in rolls but in practice, it fall short. The
government may promise to release certain things but in practice they don't
or it's not very meaningful.

The quality of elections may also be a problem. There are elections but it
may not be a level playing field. Not everyone will be able to compete, and
you can't always be sure that everyone votes will count equally, or take
media. The government will have an ostensibly free press and free television
and free newspapers.

But in reality you might find that those newspapers can say certain things
and that they are often under pressure or are forced to close down if they
are very critical. In this kinda context, in jails have a hard time to
operate because they need to constantly figure out, can we do this or can we
not?

What will be the implications of this action? Might we get in trouble if we

speak the truth? May some of the people we are working with get arrested or
get harassed or get locked up? And so in this context, NGOs can certainly
operate, but they have to always be mindful of the laws and regulations, both
written and unsaid, in order to be able to get their things done.

Most of the places where we work are semi-open and have various restrictions.
For NGO this means the advocacy needs to be done with care and consideration.
Particularly in two ways. The first is about the strategy. You really have to
think, given the problem I am working on in this play, what can I do in order
to succeed?

Just because something works somewhere else, may not mean it can work in your
context. So we'll get to think about that in a moment. The second question is
a very practical one about self-preservation, about taking care of yourself
and your people. You have to think, in this place in which I'm working, what
risks does my advocacy work expose myself, my organization and my colleagues
to, and how can we mitigate for that?

You'll be better placed to make those judgments rather than anyone else from
the outside, and we'll talk more about this in the sixth session of this
course. Before you start planning and doing advocacy, it's really important
to be clear what is worth advocating for. In other words, what are you trying
to achieve?

This might sound simple, but it's actually harder than it seems. You might
think we know what we want. Just tell me how to do it effectively. Believe
me, we've often felt this way ourselves, but we have learned that sometimes
the solutions we come up with are not that helpful.

Or I'm not that clear.

>> So how would this look in a real scenario? Coming up now, Ruth and Rakesh
will explore how this plays out in the education sector in East Africa. We
all know how important education is to parents and to societies and how much
money governments put into building schools, buying textbooks and paying
teachers particularly.

But we might not all be aware of how hard it is to improve the quality of
education. Rakesh, I know you have a lot of experience in this area. So this
is the example that we are going to carry through for the rest of the course.
Why don't you give us a little bit of background on education policy and
practice in East Africa?

Over the past decade or so, and a sense of how non-governmental organizations
have tried to accelerate progress.
>> Allow me to go a little further back when countries like Kenya, Uganda,
and Tanzania became independent of the 60s. The vast majority of children had
no opportunity for schooling. Education was just meant to be for a small
elite that was gonna work in the colonial government.

So you can understand why at independence, a huge focus of the newly

independent governments was to democratize education, to make it education
for all, rather than just a few and to make sure that all children got to, at
least, complete primary school, got to be literate, read, write and count.

So policies are a path to expand education by building schools, enrolling

kids, training new teachers. Education became a huge political priority and
the most important pathway out of poverty, through which people could get
status and jobs and a better life. And the most important measure of success,
became enrollment, how many kids of school age were signed up to go to
school?

Over time 1 millions of children got into primary school, NGOs had to
continue to fight to include those who would be left out such as poor kids
who could not afford school fees, or kids who were living in far flung
scattered rural community. And after the economic downturns in the 1980s,
NGO's had to fight for sufficient resources to go to education.

To build classrooms, to buy desks, and to pay teachers. So in short, what

happened over those decades was a familiar advocacy pattern. Number one,
focus on getting kids enrolled for schooling. Number two, remove the cost
barriers to schooling. And number three., make the case to government and for
aid money to go towards education.

Many of these efforts are really successful. In many countries, education

took the largest share of the government budget, teachers were the largest
share of the government payroll, and enrollment numbers went from something
like 5% of independents to over 90% in 1990.
>> Wow, 5% to 90% does sounds like a pretty amazing success.

>> It was a huge success. However, keen observers started to notice some
problems. Kids while enrolled in schools but they're not learning. Even after
many years in school, too many children seemed to be unable to read and lack
other basic skills.
>> So what was the response to that?

>> Well, there are really kind of two sets of responses. One, for example,
from the then president of Tanzania, was to argue for sequencing. He
basically said, first, we must get all children into school. And once that
happens we can then focus on quality. The problem with this approach was that
many pupils and parents were voting with their feet, meaning they were in
school, but noting that school was not very useful, many of them started
skipping school on some days or just dropping out all together.

The other response common among many NGOs was to say that the core problem
was a lack of sufficient resources and that more money was needed for
education. Some of the advocacy campaigns used newspaper and television to
show photographs of schools in really bad condition. And this embarrassed
politicians in the home countries and made kind of well-wishing people in the
donor countries feel bad.

And as a result, billions of dollars are spent to make schools look better.
So in addition to enrollment, the next most important measure of success
became new classrooms, it became very popular for kids and parents and
politicians and donors to have their picture taken next to the nice new
classroom.

>> Yeah, I have seen a lot of those picture of nice new classrooms. But, as a
result, did the children go to school more often and did they learn more?
>> The rules in asking that question I think you're really putting your
finger in the core chunks. You see, most people assume that things were
better because the schools looked better.

There were more classrooms. There were more desks. There were even some more
books. And we could definitely report that more money was being spent and
more kids were being enrolled. You see what all of us are doing is assuming
that more schooling equals more learning. That the way you make short
children learn is by just sending them to school, but the truth is we didn't
really know.

The enrollment measure that we're all focused on. When it came down to it,
all it told you was whether your child name was written on a list at the
beginning of the year. That's what enrollment means, it didn't tell you
whether the kids were actually attending school regularly let alone tell you
what the kids are learning.

I say what at this time was also happening is that there are a set of studies
from countries around the world who try showing that billions of dollars that
are being spent on improving infrastructure often did not translate into
better learning outcomes. In other words, more schooling was not leading to
more learning.

We also saw at the same time studies that showed that teachers with
credentials, such as teachers who had degrees, bachelors degrees, masters
degrees, were not necessarily better teachers than those who did not have
degrees. Better classrooms did not lead to more learning and ensuring that
teachers had degrees, and better credentials.
Also, they didn't seem to lead to more learning. In our own experience in
East Africa, as we were observing what was going on, seemed to kind of
confirm what these studies are showing. Or giving us that uneasy feeling that
despite these huge investments, children were not doing well.

That schooling had become a kind of a charade. Where the teachers of the kids
who are going through the motions pretending to do education, but it wasn't
real. And the most frustrating thing was that these concerns were all being
drowned out by the big enrollment numbers and the shiny new schools and the
donors and governments and, frankly, even people, parents and kids.

Congratulating themselves for the progress that was being made and no one
seemed to be interested in looking at the problem.
>> So, why do you think you weren't able to get attention? What do you think
the core problem was?
>> We came to realize two things. First, that all the focus on improving
education was about inputs, like what you put in to improve education.

So things like money, classrooms, books, teachers with qualifications. It

wasn't about outcomes. How are children better off at the end of it? Imagine
you have a bread factory, it's as if we wore focused on how much flour and
salt and water was going into it. But we were not looking at the quality of
the bread.

Whether the bread was edible, healthy, and tasted good. So we realized what
we needed to do is to change the focus of the policy makers as well a the
public, from focusing on schooling inputs and instead to focus on learning
outcomes. The second thing we realized is, if we wanna do this, we better
come up with a good measure for measuring those learning outcomes Okay,
Rakesh, so what exactly did you do about this?

>> Educationalists all around the world agree that the most important
foundation for life-long learning is basic literacy and numeracy. The ability
to be able to read and count, which you usually should achieve by third grade
or around when you are 9 years old. That's the level we focus, we figure that
if that's what you can get right, then you have the foundation.

Fortunately there was a group in India that had figured out a really
interesting methodology to actually measure whether children are all
learning. What they did, was they used volunteers to use this very simple
test to measure whether children could read and whether they could count. And
it was fantastic, because it was a very simple way of doing this.

You could train people over a day or two,
fanned out across the country to people's
ability of children aged between 7 and 16
whether they could actually count. And we
Africa.
to know how to use this. And they
homes, and they measured the
to see whether actually read and
adopted this methodology in east

And what is really important about this approach is that it's repeated every
year. So it keeps the information fresh and it gives you new data every year.
And what this allowed us to do, was not to just give us opinions but to give
actual data, actual evidence about whether children could read and count.
And it was done in a regular systematic way across the whole part of the
country, so that we couldn't just be dismissed that its only happening in a
few places. And once evidence was gathered, the amazing part of it was that
it was shared of the community, so people who are involved in the testing
knew what was going on.

And for many of them, it also opened their eyes, they realized that their
children had been going to school, but were not able to read. That
information was then also shared with authorities across different levels,
local and national, and it was made public. it was published and put on
websites, and it got a lot of media coverage.

So what we were able to do with this approach was to show that even though
millions of children were in school, that many of those children were in fact
not learning. That they were not able to read and that they were not able to
do arithmetic. And the fact that this information were shared at the
community level, at the national level, and through media begun to change the
conversation from input to outcome.

And began to change our focus from how shiny are the classrooms, how many
books did we have to focusing on the children and asking the questions, are
they actually learning?
>> Rakesh, that was a great example. How one set of organizations thought
about a problem and a context, and used research and observations to figure
out what to do.

The theory of change is just another way of saying, give them a problem that
you wanna solve, and your understanding of the causes of that problem. What
changes do you need to promote or induce? And working backwards from those
changes, what activities will you undertake to make those changes happen?

Often when you're doing a theory of change with your colleagues, you have to
spend quite a bit of time working through it, debating, thinking, drawing
information from other sources, so that you really get to a place where you
can settle on a theory of change that works for your organization.

Developing a theory of change is a crucially important and valuable step in

building a shared understanding, and a clear description of your work that
you can share with others.
>> So now that you've seen an example of how you can identify a problem and
the best solution, we'll go over some steps for how you could do this in your
own situation.

This will help you create a theory of change. Step one, state the problem.
>> What problem are you working to solve?
>> Step two, is to lay out all the possible causes of the problem.
>> If there are man, see if you can categorize them in ways that make sense
to you.

You might remember that earlier we talked about behavioral problem or

governance problem. So if those categories make sense, you can use them. If
they don't, use other language that make sense to you and your colleagues.
Whenever possible draw from data and research evidence to identify these
concepts.
>> Now that you have the direct causes of the problem, step three is to lay
out the indirect causes of the problem.
>> That is the causes of the causes of the problem. And as you might remember
from the precocious story and from earlier discussions for example of the
problem of HIV prevalence. The most immediate problems are often behavioral
that people aren't doing what they should be doing. And then it works
backwards to larger more structural problems that are pervasive in society.

And again draw from data, from research evidence, and from your own knowledge
to come up with your understanding of those causes.
>> In the fourth step, you're going to flip the first three steps towards the
positive.
>> So until this point, we've been building a kind of chain of problems.

What's the problem, what's caused that, what's caused those causes? So next,
what you wanna do is state the positive change you want to occur. So if the
problem is that children in the early grades are not learning, the positive
change you want to occur is that those children consistently learn to grade
level, so that they can succeed in later years.

Next you wanna state the changes in the direct causes that need to occur, so
that that positive change will happen. At this point, think through and write
down any assumptions you've made to draw this link. You'll remember from
Rakesh's story that, people wanted better education and they thought the way
to get there was by putting more resources into building schools and hiring
teachers.

So they made a lot of assumptions when they decided that those were the right
actions to take.
>> The fifth step is to lay out all the changes that need to happen within
the indirect causes of your problem, so that the direct causes never get a
chance to appea

>> Think this through and write down any assumptions you've made throughout
this link. Basically you're building a causal chain that leads from the
positive change you want to see in the world, say the children learning at
grade level, that's through the changes that need to occur to make that
happen.

As you do that, you'll refer back to your understanding of the problems at

each level.
>> At this point, you're ready for step six, the final step.
>> State the actions that you and, or others could take to induce the changes
in those indirect causes. Think it through and write down any assumptions
you've made throughout this link.

As you can imagine, doing all these work is not easy and you have to make
some guesses along the way. As you make the guesses, that's often where
you'll find the key assumptions in your theory of change. You may find it
challenging and even frustrating to fit complex problems into a linear and
simplistic framework.

You might find it helpful in fact to break free of the linear approach and
draw pictures, connect arrows, try to represent your understanding of how the
problems and solutions are connected. The point though, is to make sure that
using reason and evidence, a kind of logical flow, you're connecting through
this reverse engineering.
The problem you're keen to solve to the activities you think need to be
undertaken to solve it. This will help us, help you figure out who you need
to persuade to do what, and particularly what needs to be done. The most
important thing though, is not to start with the activities themselves, not
to start with what you think you want to do.

Don't start by listing everything your organization does and then finding
ways to draw a line than logical connection, to the good things you want to
happen in the world. The mission your organization is working on. When you do
that, you might miss opportunities to allocate your time and other resources
in the most strategic and effective ways.

And you commit one of the primary sins of NGOs, which to think that their
business is to stay in business rather than to solve problem. Your aim is to
solve important social, political and environmental problems. And working
through a theory a change can help you figure out how to spend your time,
money and energy in the most effective ways.

Okay, we've covered a lot of ground here and it may sound very complicated to
prepare a theory of change going through all these forward steps and backward
steps. It will make much more sense to you, if you try to do it with a
problem that you are working on and in a context that you're working in.

>> Thanks for tuning in. Next up, join us as Ruth and Rakesh discuss what's
to look at when designing a successful advocacy strategy.