Capacity building runs the risk of being a development-speak word that means everything and nothing. But in Zambia, building capacity with civil society partners was the key to increasing the use of data in government decision-making. What’s the difference? Having concrete tools and goals, and supporting partners to make their own decisions.
In fact, the Local and Global Action for Food Security Project in Africa (LAGAFA) got 80% of its partners to rely on data for actively conducting advocacy. Before, partners and the government used “a collection of hearsay” to make food security decisions, instead of facts and evidence.
With the support of CARE Austria, LAGAFA worked with 15 civil society partners from 2010-2012 so that they could advocate for sustainable local change.
What did we accomplish?
- Partners got stronger: Partner membership grew by 80% as the 15 actors were able to adopt better behavior and represent more people.
- More women joined: The number of women in partner networks more than doubled (2.3 times), and total women’s membership went from one third of organizations to 42%.
- Evidence became the base of advocacy: All 15 groups were more likely to collect data to predict food security needs than before. They jointly produced 4 evidence-based policy briefs to guide their work.
- Gender became part of the conversation: Not only did the partners rely on evidence-based policy briefs, but those briefs all contained gender-disaggregated data, a new habit for almost everyone.
- More transparency: Groups got better at financial management, reporting, and transparency.
How did we get there?
- Work with Networks: CARE Partnered with the Livingston Civil Society Organization Forum to coordinate partners and activities.
- Focus on organizational strengthening: CARE worked with partners to focus on the core of what they needed to do to become credible actors that could sway the government: collect and use data, improve financial reporting, represent their members effectively, focus on women.
- Have specific, measurable goals: The advocacy strategies were targeted to push for measurable change on budget allocations to the agriculture sector. This helped organizations hold the government accountable to change.
What did we learn?
LAGAFA wasn’t a perfect project, and there were some pretty significant operational challenges working with local networks and meeting targets. Nevertheless, they were able to change the landscape in Zambia. Besides their accomplishments, they showed some valuable lessons for how to work with civil society for advocacy—and for all of CARE as we move towards more work with partners.
- Pick the right partners: This kind of capacity building and taking a back seat to others means we need to be on the same page. This kind of project should start with rigorous stakeholder mapping and multiple options.
- Be realistic: Advocacy and work through partners is a slow process. The 36 months LAGAFA had did not deliver complete policy change, but given the length of time policy processes take, we should not have expected it to.
- Combine advocacy with other targets: Because advocacy goals are unlikely to completely or immediately deliver on food security priorities, it can be important to look for ways to combine advocacy with field programming where participants can see the results, and advocacy can pull its messages from community-level work.
Want to learn more?
Check out the project evaluation.