Advocacy for Better Health: A Workshop Curriculum on Community Mobilization and Advocacy Action Planning - Facilitator's Guide

This workshop curriculum is designed to assist community groups to advocate for better health and social services in their community by helping them identify health-related problems to address, and empowering them to create their own advocacy action plan to create change within their communities.

The Community Mobilization and Advocacy Action Planning workshops form part of the Advocacy for Better Health project, a United States Agency for International Development (USAID)- funded 5-year project (2014 - 2018) aimed at improving the availability, accessibility, and quality of health and social services in Uganda. Implemented by PATH and Initiatives Inc., the project seeks to more fully engage communities in the planning and monitoring of health and social services, while also enhancing the capacity of civil society organisations (CSOs) to represent citizen interests and conduct advocacy to strengthen health-related policies, budgets, and programmes. Across 35 target districts and at the national level, more than 20 local implementing partners are mobilising communities to demand and hold duty-bearers accountable for health-related goals and commitments - from the facility to the highest-levels of decision-making.

This Facilitator’s Guide provides a structure through which Advocacy for Better Health implementing partners can lead community groups to identify health-related problems, and be mobilised to collectively demand and advocate for improved availability, accessibility, and quality of health services. This workshop contains six sessions, each of which are designed to be interactive and participatory, maximizing discussions and the sharing of  ideas between community members. The sessions are as follows:

• Session 1. Mobilizing communities - includes mapping out key networks within the community, and identifying effective methods for engaging these networks in addressing health problems. 
• Session 2. Understanding advocacy - defines advocacy and explains why advocacy is important in improving health.
• Session 3. Identifying advocacy issues - participants identify problems in their community that would make good issues for advocacy.
• Session 4. Identifying advocacy goals and change agents - participants develop an advocacy goal, and identify people with the power to help them reach their goal.
• Session 5. Creating an advocacy action plan - participants identify their community’s resources for advocacy and complete an analysis of strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT); as well as develop an action plan to implement in their community.
• Session 6. Reviewing progress - participants determine whether they are making progress towards their advocacy goal, and develop a plan for routinely updating their advocacy action plan.