A Toolkit for Environmental Advocacy in Africa The final draft of this Toolkit stresses a “bottom-up” approach to environmental decision-making by providing advocates at the local level with tools for making their voices heard on issues that affect them and their environment. The Toolkit covers areas such as: Developing a strategy; Collecting information; Building alliances; Participating in government decision-making processes; Distributing information; Working with the media; Bringing lawsuits; Using economic advocacy, such as strikes and boycotts; Organizing demonstrations, protests, and civil disobedience; Addressing the possible risks of advocacy.

Advocacy Impact Assessment Guidelines DFID’s major advocacy activities focus on influencing agencies and governments to invest in infrastructure. However, it is hard to find concrete evidence of the contributions that advocacy makes towards poverty eradication.Here we provide guidelines for an approach that many NGOs take to assess advocacy impacts. Being clear about the changes you want to effect means that you can develop measurable advocacy objectives. Designing indicators that act as milestones towards the achievement of your objectives provides a basis in your search for evidence. There are different types of advocacy impacts, known as different dimensions of change, and we describe some indicators for the following dimensions: changes in policies and their implementation, private sector change, strengthening civil society, aiding democracy and improving the material situation of individuals. Participatory monitoring and evaluation asks the people being affected by a project whether it has made a difference. However, this is often more complex than standard evaluation systems and you need to be clear about the goals of the process and who should be involved. In order to assess impact, you need to know the existing situation prior to advocacy. This can be determined by identifying your target's Awareness, Knowledge, Attitudes and Behaviour (AKAB) on your issue, and progress can then be monitored by AKAB re-evaluation. Once you have the information,it needs to be analysed. Lessons can then be learned and evaluation results used to demonstrate that advocacy works.

Strategic Planning: An Inquiry Approach This is a training manual with five steps on strategic planning. These steps are: - Organizing the strategic planning process - Discovery - an organizational inquiry - Discovery - an environment and resource inquiry - Dream - propositions for the future - Vision and mission statements - Design - the action plan   It also highlights participation in the process and there is no blaming atmosphere…

Video: a tool for participation Abstract: In Zimbabwe, a community of workers calling themselves Masimanyane (Ndebele for ‘Let us Unite’) are using video to break out of their cycle of despondency and hopelessness. The workers are employed by poor, small-scale farmers in one of the poorest parts of Matabeleland where few development organisations are active. The farmers have been given basic video training and the necessary equipment by FARMESA, a new, regional FAO programme which dedicates itself to finding more participative ways of working with poor farmers.