A How-To on Policy Advocacy

Advocacy is not a thing to be feared. This online training tool will equip and prepare you to confidently advocate for community-led development. Whether you are a total novice, much like I was before completing the course, or have some experience in your back pocket, PATH’s training lays down a step-by-step process that can be helpful at any level of advocacy work. On-boarding and syncing to a framework such as this can help streamline partnerships and coalitions who at one time all used different processes and terms but now can communicate easily and seamlessly.

Their ten part framework will help users strategize about the best way to affect policy change by implementing PATH’s own approach to policy advocacy that focuses on informing policy making, fostering coalitions, and strengthening advocacy capacity. Composed of a pre-test, introduction, ten modules, and a post-test this training promises to help those who complete it be able to:

  • Identify the critical components of policy advocacy strategy
  • Identify policy changes to address health challenges
  • Identify tactics for influencing decision makers

As a complete novice in policy advocacy I found PATH’s step-by-step approach very helpful to get a basic understanding about the most effective way to create policy change. The program is interactive and easy to understand. The training uses a case report influenced by real events to walk you through the ten step process. Each module use examples from this case report in every step from defining your advocacy goals to brainstorming effective advocacy activities and tactics. There are interactive sessions that allow you to deeply engage with the material.  

PATH was born from the ‘belief of health equity and the power of innovation to improve health and save lives’. For more than forty years they have pioneered progress in vaccines, drugs, diagnostics, devices, and system and service innovations. Their online learning platform G3 hosts a training for ‘Policy Advocacy for Health: a course on policy advocacy strategy development’. This training is a brief, yet thorough, introduction to policy advocacy. The program focuses specifically on advocacy for health policy, but the framework provided can easily be applied to other areas of focus as well. PATH’s training provides a common language and steps for advocates to follow to achieve their policy goals.This is a great tool for complete beginners and would be a useful part of any intern orientation for policy advocacy organizations. A quick, straightforward training such as this will be useful to get teams on the same page and help broader groups speak the same language.