Advocacy is an important leadership tool for using your voice to draw attention to significant issues, compel people to act, inspire positive change, and demonstrate caring toward others. This toolkit offers guidance on how to use public speaking to promote healthcare development within West Africa, including how to advocate for yourself and others in everyday situations. 

This training guide introduces the concept of advocacy and provides a framework for developing an advocacy campaign. Although the guide is designed for a workshop setting, it can be used as a self-teaching device as well. Divided into twelve modules, the guide presents general information; however, the participant must use his or her own experience to answer questions related to the module’s topics—this forms the essence of the advocacy training. The first module explores the concepts of advocacy, politics, etc., and is followed by a module on using data to identify policy issues and solutions. The next module describes criteria to consider in selecting an advocacy objective and is followed by a session on identifying key decision makers and understanding their positions around the objective. Next, creating and delivering advocacy messages are examined as well as targeting the messages to different audiences who can influence the decision-making process. Skills for meeting with decision-makers and for building and maintaining coalitions are clearly outlined in this guide. Finally, the guide outlines procedures for evaluating advocacy efforts and raising funds and resources to support advocacy. The last two modules define terms and list resources used in this guide.

Specific Objectives:

• Explore the concept of advocacy for change
• Crafting an impactful advocacy objective
• Identifying your advocacy and agenda in line with your objective
• Implementation of an Advocacy Agenda
• Skills for Meeting Key Stakeholders
• Tools to determine success and where to improve upon

Who is this course for?

This course is aimed at:  

• Healthcare practitioners
• public policy practitioners for Healthcare 
• lawyers   
• academics and researchers  in healthcare
• professionals.