Strategic Focus Area 1: Campaigns and Communication
Overview
Collective action will require working with various partners at national, continental and global partners to identify the need, responding to the demand, and innovating for change. The aim will be building and galvanising a critical mass of the African populace to advocate for debt accountability, transparency, and participation as espoused in our African Borrowing Charter. This critical mass will be drawn from the African citizenry, members of parliament, journalists and media house, as well as civil society organisations. Indeed, it is through the medium of innovation and initiative over the years that will give rise to a collective action of African voices on debt and development.
1. Impact Communication
Impactful communication facilitates change, and it encourages people to own the message and share it further therefore creating a common narrative that everyone can relate to and want to be a part of. To deliver results, the message has to centre on people’s needs and struggles, and this can only be known through research and intentionally listening to people through their feedback.
When well done, communication stirs engagement, has an effect on the audience and results in change immediately, or in the medium to long term. In a nutshell our ability to breakdown the complex issues on debt matters in a way that is accessible, informative, and accurate will strengthen the impact of research and analysis. To achieve impactful communication, AFRODAD will focus on the following elements:
Localisation and Participatory Communication – Meaningful participation cannot occur without participatory communication. This type of communication creates opportunities for people to visualise their social problems, stimulate collective introspection and discussions thus potentially identifying solutions. This includes the use of dialogic methods and tools to promote change. Our approach towards sustainable behaviour and social change will strongly leverage on research. For people to participate, they need to feel that their culture, language, and their socio-economic contexts are all taken into consideration. We will therefore be keen to understand its varied audience and will respond to most needs including translating content to some local languages.
Edutainment: educates and entertain (edutainment) and will involve formative evaluation methods to help analyse target audiences to determine their needs, behaviours, and media usage, hence developing appropriate programmes. Worldviews, narratives, and identities are framed by stories. Stories are powerful for their ability to hook and hold attention and inspire action. They are one of the best tools to persuade people and create change. Development organisations and communities have meaningful and impactful stories deserving visibility and attention. We will develop stories and frame them in a humanised way to highlight the effects of various economic and social inequalities on citizens.
2. Campaigns and Outreach
Campaigns seek to demonstrate to decision-makers that members of the public, voters and consumers are concerned about the issue. Campaigning also educates the public about the organisation’s issue and motivates them to act in support of the change. In the social and economic development context, advocacy aims to create or change policies, laws, regulations, distribution of resources or other decisions that affect people’s lives and to ensure that such decisions lead to implementation.
In this strategic period, we are implementing targeted campaigns to influence governments and the public on pertinent issues under the organisational area of work. In addition to driving continental campaigns, we will also support national campaigns led by our national partners. AFRODAD plays an important role in coordinating and supporting campaigns such as the Africa debt- Stop the Bleeding Campaign and the Fight Inequality at the Pan-African level; and the Okoa Uchumi Coalition in Kenya and Zambia Debt Coalition in Zambia.
The main aim of these campaigns is to advocate for accountable, transparent, and participatory approaches to debt contraction as enshrined in our African Borrowing Charter. Our research and analytical findings will guide the key messages of campaigns to undertake and the appropriate advocacy spaces to direct the campaign towards.
Strategic Focus Area 2: Capacity Building
Overview
The ability of AFRODAD to successfully build an African collective on debt and development requires all African citizens, CSOs, Media and lawmakers to be empowered and emboldened on the technical aspects of public debt. This means identifying the skills, knowledge, data, policy, and legislative gaps that exist across the continent when it comes to debt and development topics.
Capacity Building Initiatives
We build journalists’ capacity to report on societal problems resulting from irresponsible borrowing and spending; have an active citizens’ voice as the duty bearers and underwriters of public debt; strengthened lawmaker capacity to hold borrowing governments to account on debt contraction. To develop lasting solutions to these problems, there is a need to effectively frame them as developmental problems and not economic theories, thus the relevance of our menu training and forums on debt and development targeting CSOs, Media, citizens, and Members of Parliament across the continent.
Through our capacity building and mobilisation programmes, we present evidence to provide a voice for the disenfranchised citizenry by empowering them to keep check on public policy on government borrowing. National, sub-regional or pan-African training sessions will be conducted throughout the strategic period in all major African languages i.e. Arabic, English, French, Portuguese, and Swahili.
- AFRODAD Media Initiative (AFROMEDI) – we will work with the media to put pressure on policymakers through factual, effective, and consistent reporting on debt and development issues and related recommendations. We will use media advocacy to advance public policy initiatives. This will entail moving from reporting on findings to finding hooks that will make our messages newsworthy and impactful. We will use a two-pronged approach: (i) building media’s reporting capacity on issues AFRODAD works on; (ii) shaping the public debate.
The Media plays a pivotal role in the policymaking process. The way the media reports issues in the public domain has a bearing on how that issue is framed in line with the agenda-setting theory. The power of the media, as the 4th estate, to set a nation or region’s agenda and to focus public attention on a few key public issues is an immense and well-documented influence. Not only do people acquire information about public affairs from the news media; readers and viewers also learn how much importance to attach to a topic based on the emphasis placed on it in the news. Also, media are a vehicle for getting the attention of specific decision-makers and opinion leaders, such as politicians, government regulators, community leaders, and corporate executives.
2. The Debt and Development Academy (DaDA)’s approach, is guided by AFRODAD’s values of panafricanism and solidarity inspired by our common struggles as Africans, that our continent continues to be faced with, and which can only be overcome by collective action. DaDA is poised to offer modular training to CSO activists on a cross-section of issues that touch on debt and development Financing Agenda. It seeks to centralise the debt discourse, linking it to domestic resource mobilisation, illicit financial flows, macroeconomics, gender equality, climate change, natural resource governance, official development assistance, and foreign direct investments, etc. Indeed, the overall objective will be to build capacity towards a common position on issues of development financing in Africa.