Advocacy

Advocacy offers pathways to political influence for apolitical organizations like Action contre la Faim.

Humanitarian advocacy is the very embodiment of humanitarian politics. Because Action contre la Faim works where populations face routine violations of fundamental human needs—access to food, drinking water, land and livelihoods—we have advocacy strategies in place to alert, inform, and influence decision-makers and political actors. These advocacy strategies allow our agency to address the underlying causes of hunger while delivering direct assistance to those in need. In practice, humanitarian advocacy enables us to engage in political arenas in ways that don’t threaten our programs on the ground, the security of our field staff, our access to vulnerable populations, or our neutrality.

Humanitarian advocacy takes place at three levels.

1. Program Level Advocacy: At the program level, advocacy is rooted in the effective delivery of humanitarian assistance, addressing barriers or threats to a population’s access to life-sustaining resources and services.

2. Policy Level Advocacy: At the policy level, advocacy can bolster humanitarian values, secure or protect humanitarian space, improve policies and practices, and challenge or propose funding priorities.

3. Public Opinion Advocacy: At the level of public opinion, advocacy aims to enlist public support, build constituencies, and shape popular opinion in support of changes to specific policies or legislation. In practice, these contexts blur as advocacy efforts often take place at all levels simultaneously. To influence political actors, advocacy strategies can take many shapes but essentially involve the packaging and delivery of our field expertise, analysis, and recommendations to the stakeholders in question—publicly or confidentially, depending on the sensitivity of the context.

Humanitarian advocacy offers pathways to political influence for apolitical organizations like Action contre la Faim. While stridently impartial in the field—targeting only the most vulnerable—we recognize that advocacy, as organized activism in support of humanitarian values and outcomes, is the very embodiment of humanitarian politics.

Recent Advocacy Efforts: Crisis in Darfur

Darfur, Sudan: Action contre la Faim issued a behind-the-scenes report entitled The Land Issue in Darfur: Sowing the Seeds of Peace, that became the focal point of our advocacy efforts in Darfur. The report, assembled from in-depth surveys and extensive interviews among Darfur’s displaced, states that unresolved tensions over land rights underlie much of the conflict and must be addressed in any proposed political solution. The land issue was lacking from ongoing policy debates over Darfur, and Action contre la Faim's advocacy effort set out to engage policymakers and political actors unaware of our field-level perspectives on the crisis.