Advocacy Capacity Building
Advocacy at global, regional, and sub national national level plays a critical role in advancing early childhood development. This includes support to prioritization, increased financing, equitable access, quality improvement, strengthened collaboration, rapid scale-up and increased impact of early childhood programmes. In support of the Nurturing Care Framework and supporting guidelines developed to provide direction for strengthening policies and programmes to better address early childhood development, AfECN with the support of Conrad N. Hilton Foundation has developed a regional advocacy capacity building programme. The regional advocacy capacity building programme aims to provide a sustained platform for supporting countries across the region to develop SMART advocacy strategies to targeting various challenges countries face in the design and implementation of early childhood programmes. The programme targets country teams that include government, civil society organizations, academia and community representatives.
The regional advocacy capacity building programme builds off a regional advocacy strategy that identifies the critical ECD risks and challenges and systemic weaknesses common to the region and recommends clear advocacy actions. It is supported by a 10 step road map for guiding countries in developing nationally aligned SMART advocacy strategies that identify the scale, scope and nature of the priority gaps and weaknesses in various countries, and then supports a step-by-step process for developing responsive strategies for an appropriately strengthened system.
The advocacy strategy is accompanied by a tool box that builds on the ten steps. depicted below. following diagram:
The key tools to support the capacity-building programme include:
1. A situation analysis which identifies common strategic nurturing care priorities and systemic weaknesses across Africa
2. A scorecard to assess the status of nurturing care and supporting systems in each country as measured against the identified priorities
3. A tool box to support the analysis of the scorecard and use of collected data to develop an evidence-based, legally grounded advocacy strategy to strengthen the system and improve the nurturing care deficits in each of the countries
Each of the participating countries will select a team of advocacy champions to lead and coordinate the co-development of a national advocacy strategy together with a wider group of national early childhood actors and partners. The champions will participate in a series of capacity-building sessions which will support the teams navigate the ten steps to developing their SMART strategies using the Tool Box as the basis for the process.