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Creating Linkages between Research, Advocacy and Media - a project of the Southern Africa Trust
Through a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Trust has embarked on a project aimed at creating and strengthening linkages between research, advocacy and media. The project will create opportunities and platforms that build innovative, scaled-up, more coherent and value-adding working relationships between different types of critical state and non-state actors. This includes researchers, civil society advocacy groups, platforms of affected people, the media, and policy makers. It will do this through learning from new knowledge development, convenings, networking and media communications, evidence-based policy dialogue, and joined-up advocacy for more effective pro-poor policy change within and between 6 countries in Africa. The 6 countries are South Africa, Ghana, Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania and Malawi.
The goal of the project is for research, advocacy and media organisations to be more effective in achieving pro-poor policy change by creating new opportunities for the different types of civil society formations to work together and to innovate in policy advocacy. The project will focus on the following thematic areas:
- agricultural productivity for household-level food security,
- resource mobilization and better allocation and distribution of resources (optimizing financing for development); and
- delivery of basic and social services.
Inclusive, participatory, and transparent governance for better development results is a cross-cutting theme of the project.
The specific thematic areas to be addressed will be finalized through an initial scoping exercise and discussions with key players and partners in each country at the start of the project.
PROJECT OBJECTIVES
The objectives of the project are as follows:
- Increased quality and coherence in the policy advocacy work of different types of civil society formations that are working on the above thematic issues in 6 countries and at a regional level, through increased knowledge of each other’s work, increased knowledge about specific policy development processes, and more evidence-based research that includes the voices of people affected by the advocacy issue;
- Increased coordination of the policy advocacy interventions of different types of civil society formations mentioned above by creating new platforms and opportunities for linking, shared learning, development of shared advocacy positions, and joint planning of policy advocacy interventions;
- Increased effectiveness of policy advocacy initiatives by the civil society formations mentioned above through the creation of a value chain between their unique policy advocacy resources amongst the different types of organizations;
- More ownership of the policy advocacy interventions of the civil society formations mentioned above by people who are directly affected by the advocacy issues being addressed resulting in longer-term sustainability of the policy changes;
- Increased access to appropriate policy making people and forums as a result of increased credibility of the policy advocacy interventions of the civil society formations mentioned above through more evidence/research-based advocacy interventions that include the voices of the people affected by the advocacy issue;
- Greater public visibility of the policy advocacy work of the civil society formations mentioned above in the mass media through increased mass media partnerships that optimize the impact of their advocacy work; and
- Stronger intermediary facilitation and policy dialogue brokering agency in the region to support the development of such value-adding civil society policy advocacy linkages and alliances in Africa.
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