Reflections from South Africa

I’m just back from 10 days working in South Africa for the Red Cross Society. My brief over the next few months is to support them as they seek to develop advocacy strategies across their provinces and nationally.

I also had the good fortune to be able to visit some of their projects across KwaZulu-Natal and to see the huge difference that they are making for people with HIV/AIDS and TB.

Having gone out there to help them develop advocacy, I was interested to see that they were already doing advocacy – they just weren’t calling it that. One big issue in this province is trying to connect the health professionals with younger people so that they understand each other. As a result of their influencing, the provincial government is now investing in what they call adult youth friendly services – advocacy in action.

I am always interested to see, as I travel around to support the development of advocacy campaigns, how often people are already doing it – see my blog post back in December. I do think that it is so important to de-mystify advocacy campaigning – it is within of reach of anyone who has a burning desire to see change!