The Youth in Action Advocacy Training, a first of its kind, is our global online course designed to train and strengthening the skills that youth advocates need to conduct strategic advocacy and find innovative solutions to some of the world’s greatest problems.
The curriculum provides learners with tools, tactics and skills to conduct strategic advocacy geared towards achieving desired policy advocacy objectives efficiently and effectively.
Having your heart in the right place is important, but that’s only the beginning. Individuals and organizations need to develop the highly valued advocacy skills to enable them to push forward sustainable and transformative change in their work.
This module introduces you to the concept of advocacy, key components of an advocacy plan and explains the importance of advocacy skills in everyday life, both for individuals and organizations.
This module enables you to select a well-defined, evidence-based, advocacy issue and goal within the context of your advocacy work and develop SMART advocacy objectives around it. You will also learn how to assess and mitigate risks associated with advocacy.
Power is an integral part of any society. People-centered advocacy requires a deep understanding of centers of power that are critical to define and analyze while pursuing an advocacy goal.
This module will help you explore how to understand different types of power and analyse policy processes as well as how to identify and maximize advocacy opportunities while working with other stakeholders.
Understanding how you envision change happening will help you think through the potential advocacy activities that will help you achieve your advocacy objectives and ultimately your advocacy goal.
This module explores how change happens and the assumptions you have about the change making process through the design of a Theory of Change for your advocacy work.
Today’s world is increasingly crowded with clutter from ‘competitive’ voices and a surge in channels of communication with the advent of social media. Targeting and segmenting your advocacy goals is crucial to breaking through and having the edge for a winning campaign.
This module enables you to develop appropriate advocacy messages that have clear, realistic and measurable goals. It also enables you to identify the most effective advocacy communication channels.
Advocacy is nothing without support from all quarters and does not conform to a one-size-fits-all approach. Each campaign must be curated in a manner that advances your advocacy goal.
This module enables you to prioritize tactics for mobilising and developing action around your advocacy objectives. You will interact with tools to enable you to develop an advocacy work plan and budget. You will also learn how to monitor commitments and promote accountability in your advocacy work.
It is time to put tools in place so that you can monitor and evaluate your actions to see if they are working and then incorporate what you learn into your advocacy work. Given advocacy’s unpredictable nature and often long timelines, tracking progress through advocacy monitoring, evaluation and learning – or MEL – is critical – not only to assess if you have met your ultimate advocacy goal, but equally as important, to understand progress and see if one is on the right track.
MEL can sometimes seem like a costly distraction, an administrative burden, or even an unwelcome instrument of external oversight required by funders. But if used well, monitoring, evaluation and learning can be powerful tools as you advance and document your advocacy work.
For an individual or organization that is new to Monitoring Evaluation and Learning (MEL), this module will walk you through the necessary steps for setting up and implementing a MEL plan in your advocacy work. If you already have a MEL plan in place, it will guide you to review and improve the MEL systems you already have in place.
The module will support you or your organisation’s efforts to monitor, evaluate and learn from your project activities and results to enhance your effectiveness and impact, as well as pull together an advocacy strategy.
Once you have developed an advocacy plan and budget, then you require to mobilize resources to enable your advocacy work to be effective. Resource mobilization is a process by which organisations identify and seek the financial and non-financial resources to achieve their mission. The process of mobilising resources takes time, research, preparation, determination, and lots of patience.
This module will introduce you to theories and techniques for identifying, engaging, and researching potential donors for your advocacy work. You will also focus on the important skills needed to support resource mobilization efforts including networking, persuading, and actively managing key stakeholders.
For advocates to actively engage with their governments, it is critical for them to understand the budget and policy processes, how to navigate them and identify where there are opportunities for public participation.
This bonus module is specifically designed for a Kenyan advocate or organization to guide them in understanding the legislative and budget making processes in Kenya. The module also discusses the issue of public participation specifically in Kenya and provides tools to help Kenyan advocates navigate the budget and policy processes so they can more efficiently and effectively engage in them.