Civil society organizations (CSOs) connect communities and the systems that govern them. The primary role, particularly of advocacy-based CSOs, should be to empower communities with the tools to advocate for their rights. This means that CSOs need to deeply understand the communities they serve and the issues affecting them, as well as how to communicate, and facilitate effective communication, with the systems of governance.
Understanding how to build these skills is crucial for any CSO working towards social change. However, the opportunities to learn how to do this are few and far between, with most CSOs adapting a learn-on-the-go approach. In this article, we share our reflections on working with CSOs in East Africa over the past 8 years, focusing on creating collaborative hubs for learning.
How to build a learning ecosystem for CSOs
It’s easy for CSOs to get caught up in their own missions and work in isolation, focusing on the things that set them apart as an organization, rather than the ways they can learn from each other. Through their Linking and Learning program, Voice, an organization working to increase access to productive and social rights, seek to create opportunities for their grantees to learn from each other, creating opportunities for growth, networking and, sometimes, solutions to problems that had long refused to go away.
As part of this program, we worked with Lightbox Africa and Advocacy Accelerator to organize the Paza Festival, where organizations were trained to give impactful speeches similar to Ted Talks. The festival was part of an effort to create a support network among grassroots organizations, encouraging collaboration, in civic spaces that are small and sometimes shrinking.
For this festival, we were working with grassroots organizations in Kenya and Tanzania that represent underrepresented communities to better advocate on the issues that affect them to decision makers, and to the broader public. JUWAZA, for example, worked towards establishing a universal pension for the elderly in Zanzibar, Namunyak fought for increased land rights for women in the Maasai community in Kenya, and FUWAVITA focused on improving deaf education in Tanzania.
The key takeaway was the importance of breaking away from working in isolation, fostering instead a culture of visibility and knowledge-sharing to achieve shared objectives and continuous improvement. We also sought to create new collaborations across rightsholder groups, for instance between those who advocated for the rights of the elderly and those that advocated for the rights of persons living with disabilities because of the high numbers of people who are both. For participants, the impact of this collaboration was significant. One attendee of the Paza Festival, advocating for the rights of women with disabilities, vividly shared:
“I will use [the] experience gained to present at different conference[s] and workshop[s] to mobilize stakeholders on inclusive matters. The new skills I gained from my fellow participants will help me to continue with my advocacy toward fight[ing] for the rights of women with disabilities in Tanzania and Africa as a whole”. – Paza Festival participant
In a separate engagement, also geared towards knowledge sharing at the grassroots level, we partnered with the Tanzania Gender Network Program (TGNP), one of the oldest and most established gender rights advocacy organizations in Tanzania, to conduct a strategic evaluation of its Knowledge Centers across the country. This initiative aimed at strengthening the capacity of the Knowledge Centers to advocate for gender equality and civic engagement within local communities.
How to integrate behavioral science in CSO practices
Each community within the Global South has its own unique characteristics, culture, and socio-political issues, which in turn shape their definition of good governance. CSOs often need to respond quickly and communicate about issues that affect their community to create awareness in time to effect social change. While familiar, the traditional rights-based communication defaulted to under this time pressure might not always resonate with their audience, or inspire them to take action.
We developed a Low Cost Message Testing Guide in collaboration with a group of CSOs from Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania to help CSOs factor nuance and complexity into the messaging they use quickly, in-house and with minimal resources. Our guide was designed to empower these communities by giving CSOs the tools to drive positive social change that’s relevant to their specific experiences and goals.
The guide was crafted as a practical tool to gauge how well the messages would be received by the priority audiences and whether they would find the message understandable, believable, persuasive, and appealing. This approach involved making the work we do – systematic testing of behavioral theories – accessible in bite size modules. We worked to transform these theories into practical applications, offering simple yet powerful tools for crafting impactful messages in a user-friendly, web-based guide.
Why we must confront identity-based biases to fully empower CSOs
In today’s world, where polarization is on the rise, we cannot turn a blind eye to the troubling effects of social exclusion. Issues such as unequal school discipline and violence against marginalized groups are not isolated incidents; they stem from deep-rooted processes that contribute to their occurrence. The communities represented by CSOs face persistent exclusion, driven by unresolved discrimination. Consider the plight of women from disadvantaged tribes or religious and linguistic minorities. Even when we remove structural and institutional barriers that keep them from fully participating in society, deep-seated identity-based biases can still hold them back. To address this, we must understand what legitimizes this exclusion within communities. This involves looking into and changing how those in majority or more advantaged positions perceive the marginalized or disadvantaged, and vice versa.
Many of the biases negatively impacting excluded groups are rooted in broader discriminatory attitudes upheld by members of the community who are otherwise included. These personal biases are deeply ingrained yet often unacknowledged or uncontrolled erode social cohesion, strain social bonds and ultimately lead to social instability. However, these biases can be effectively countered through targeted behavioral interventions. Such interventions could focus on encouraging individuals to adopt others’ perspectives or fostering opportunities for meaningful interactions and conversations between individuals. This paradigm moves beyond a focus solely on an individual’s psychology to acknowledging the power of the environment and the dynamics of decision-making.
While working with civil society, it is also important to practice what we preach. In our work at Busara, we emphasize inclusion by involving our research partners in the design of solutions, and communicating with gatekeepers after the point of collecting data. Our engagements in the Voice program in particular have been key in identifying and understanding where our own biases as implementers might lie and the steps that need to be taken to ensure inclusion. For instance, the project invested heavily in ensuring that persons with disabilities were able to participate fully through sign language interpreters and text-to-speech technology.
Back to bias basics: is this where our focus should lie?
As we navigate the complexities of governance, we find ourselves pondering a critical question: Can addressing bias as a social construct revolutionize our approach? Picture a world where the representatives of marginalized voices and those who lend them their ears stand united as one community, where a shared sense of belonging fosters engagement and support. Could reshaping the terms on which individuals participate and interact with each other in society create an environment that not only welcomes but also strengthens the efforts of CSOs? It is no longer enough to have a mere seat at the table. What we truly need is powerful voices, or representation for marginalized voices, that dare to challenge the status quo, and for the table to be ready to listen.
