Adding southern weight to northern advocacy
Bread for the World (BFW) is a US-based advocacy organization that exists to mobilize grassroots support in the US in the fight against hunger and to lobby the US Congress. Its key reason for partnering with civil society organizations in Zambia and Nicaragua to advocate for debt cancellation and to promote meaningful participation in the PRSP process was to better understand southern perspectives in order to inform this lobbying.
It was in fact Bread for the World Institute (BFWI), BFW’s research and education arm, that established the partnership with the Jesuit Centre for Theological Reflection (JCTR) in Zambia and Jubilee Nicaragua.[1] The Ford Foundation made a grant to BFWI, which BFWI distributed among the three parties according to a jointly planned budget. Everyone involved saw this very much as a three-way partnership, in which BFWI took the lead in relations with Ford and in some coordination and administrative aspects of the project.
What did the grant fund?
In Zambia, JCTR continued its grassroots public education for debt cancellation but added a series of workshops, videos and street theatre designed to prepare rural and urban communities throughout the country for meaningful consultation on PRSP. JCTR also targeted senior officials in the Zambian government and the international donor community in its advocacy for deeper debt cancellation and its critiques of PRSP, even while remaining engaged with the PRSP process as one of several civil society representative bodies.
Jubilee Nicaragua continued to focus mainly on grassroots public education – building economic literacy, raising awareness in indigenous rural communities, mobilizing networks of people’s movements and organizing international conferences to call for deeper debt cancellation.
BFWI’s supported this work by sharing information on current developments at World Bank and IMF headquarters and in the US government. Just as importantly, BFWI was able to use the in-country data and analysis produced by JCTR and Jubilee Nicaragua, disseminated via BFWI’s electronic listserv and through other means, to support BFW’s own policy advocacy. In this way BFWI and JCTR in particular were able to coordinate efforts for maximum impact. One example was their support for successful advocacy efforts, led by Jubilee 2000, for delivery of front-loaded debt relief for Zambia.[2] BFWI also published regular critiques of the PRSP process and civil society participation therein, not only in Zambia but also in Bolivia, Uganda, Mozambique and Tanzania. These were based on field research in those countries facilitated by JCTR and other in-country contacts.
Did we achieve what we hoped for?
As research and policy advocacy organizations, BFWI and BFW lack the field presence that many development NGOs count on to ground them in the reality of the issues on which they advocate. Forging closer and more formal ties with the two southern organizations undoubtedly helped BFWI in its goal of informing its work through access to up-to-date information and analysis on specific national realities. The connection also enabled BFWI to pool country-specific information and knowledge with fellow NGO advocates and so boosted BFWI’s credibility with policymakers.
BFWI’s larger goal for the project was to understand southern perspectives on the issues, while JCTR and Jubilee Nicaragua hoped, among other things, to mobilize northern advocacy organizations to amplify their voices in the global policymaking arena. In this they were only partially successful. In this author’s view, for BFWI to truly bring the weight of southern stakeholders’ perspectives to bear on its decision-making, formal southern representation on BFW’s board would be needed, or at the very least formation of a formally recognized committee to advise the board and management.
As it was, JCTR and to a lesser extent Jubilee Nicaragua remained entities with a voice but not a vote in BFW’s positions on the issues. Nowhere was this more clearly demonstrated than in the divergent positions taken by Jubilee Nicaragua and BFWI on PRSP, with the former clearly rejecting it as structural adjustment under a new guise and the latter willing to view it as an at least potentially positive avenue to policy change. JCTR took a middle position, engaging in Zambia’s national PRSP process but remaining a staunch critic of PRSP in the media and directly with the IFIs. These positions were well known to all three parties before entering into the agreement, and accepted as part of the richness and creative tension inherent in such South-North collaboration.
1 Jubilee Nicaragua is a network of people’s movements, CSOs and NGOs. JCTR is a religiously affiliated think-tank and advocacy group. The advocacy around the PRSP process was in fact part of a larger programme involving policy advocacy and public education efforts for debt cancellation.
2 This somewhat mitigated Zambia’s particularly egregious debt situation.
Elena McCollim was a staff member at BFWI during most of the time of this project’s design and implementation. She is currently on the staff of InterAction, the largest alliance of US-based development and humanitarian NGOs. She can be contacted at EMcCollim@interaction.org
This analysis stems from the author’s perspective as a staff member and does not necessarily reflect the official positions of BFWI.
