Two UWASNET Secretariat staff are undertaking an online training on advocacy. The online training that is hosted on the Learning Management System “Atingi” is being supported by the Civil Society in Uganda Support Programme (CUSP) which is funded by the European Union and the German government.
The online course will run for five (05) weeks starting February 8th, 2021 with a total of 10 learning sessions as highlighted below;
- Learning Session 1: Understanding Lobbying and Advocacy
- Learning Session 2: Understanding the Public Policy Process
- Learning Session 3: Identifying the Advocacy Issue
- Learning Session 4: Analysis and Research of the Advocacy Issue
- Learning Session 5: Stakeholder Analysis
- Learning Session 6: Developing the Advocacy Strategy and Plan
- Learning Session 7: Mobilisation and Implementation
- Learning Session 8: Monitoring and Evaluation of Advocacy Strategy
- Learning Session 9: Challenges and Limitations of Advocacy
- Learning Session 10: Action Planning
The course has an e-Learning support team at NIRAS IP Consult who implements the training and will support participants throughout the training.
Sinayi Kasibante, expert trainer, will guide participants through the training module, answer their questions about advocacy and lobbying and the content of the module, and provide personalized feedback on their learning tasks.
Jacqueline Achiro, a communications specialist, will check in with participants regularly to see if they need any additional support to continue their successful participation and also be available for technical and logistical questions on using the e-Learning platform, and submitting learning tasks to Sinayi for feedback.
In a welcome email to participants, Sinayi Kasibante wrote that “the course aims to build your [participants’] capacity as CSO staff to enable you [them to] have a clear understanding of lobbying and advocacy and give you [them] practical assistance on how to actually undertake advocacy work.”
The benefits for participating in the course are highlighted below;
- The knowledge gained from this course will help you to plan and implement your organizations advocacy work systematically, and this will ensure long lasting changes in the lives of the poor and marginalized communities you are working with.
- The course will sharpen your skills in analysis and research that will enable you to identify a good advocacy issue. A good advocacy issue can easily be understood by various stakeholders, and this will ease your work of developing a realistic advocacy strategy for implementing your advocacy work. Many advocacy strategies have difficulty achieving their goals because the problems they seek to address are not clearly defined or understood or not perceived as a priority problem by a large number of people – especially by excluded groups whom the advocacy work is intended to benefit.
The two UWASNET Secretariat staff taking part in the online training are Rehema Aanyu, the Liaison and Networking Officer and Amos Ziwa, a Program Assistant under the Policy Analysis and Advocacy department. The two participants were nominated by the UWASNET Executive Director through the CUSP advisor at UWASNET to participate in the training.
