The policy and advocacy department of CIDI seeks to empower communities to positively influence national policies and practices towards improvement of their living conditions. It considers community empowerment to be community ownership, management and control of their life choices.
By harnessing communities with skills to understand and participate in policy making, planning and monitoring of service delivery, they are able to promote social accountability, while meaningfully engaging the duty bearers. Community led advocacy elicits catalysts of change within the communities making communities more resilient and their development more sustainable.
The Advocacy and Good governance actions underpin the organizational theory of change that is built on pillars of enhanced the capacity of communities aware of their rights and responsibilities. voice on issues that affect them and participate in their own development, enhanced capacity of duty bearers to respond to effectively respond to the needs of the communities through an improved enabling environment of pro-people policies and laws as well as equitable allocation of resources. Generation of evidence, through research and strategic service delivery is the core of CIDI’ evidence based advocacy.
CIDI is committed to supporting systems strengthing working with and advocating for government structures and policy and regulatory framework that respond to the needs of the people to ensure sustainable development.
Picture above: All activities aimed at enabling people to influence policies and practices that improve their standard of living are found across all the thematic areas of CIDI.
It is against this background that CIDI formulated the strategic indicators for the lobbying and advocacy department as follows:
- To create awareness on issues of policy rights and entitlements of water, hygiene and sanitation, food security and health.
- To enhance the capacity of communities to engage in policy processes on pertinent issues affecting agriculture, conflict resolution and peace building, health promotion, human rights awareness, water sanitation and hygiene, gender issues and any disasters that may come up.
- To strengthen research, documentation and information dissemination on issues that affect agriculture, conflict resolution and peace building, health promotion, human rights awareness, Water Sanitation and Hygiene, gender issues and any disasters that may come up.
- To lobby and advocate the duty bearers at all levels as regards issues on agriculture, conflict resolution and peace building, health promotion, human rights, Water Sanitation and Hygiene gender issues and any disasters that may come up.
All activities aimed at enabling people to have themselves a positive impact on their standard of living,
are found across all thematic areas of CIDI:
- Capacity building of the communities and dutybearers .
- Promote community participation in government planning processes and monitoring of development programmes by both private players and government.
- Policy influence and Practice advocacy
- Conflict resolution and peace building.
- Promotion of equity and inclusion of vulnerable groups.
- Promotion of social accountability
- Rights, entitlements and rights awareness through different strategies like rooted democracy, citizen’s led initiatives and action among others.
- Contribute to the gender and climate change justice discourse.
It is in line with the above indicators and activities, that CIDI has a Memorandum of Understanding with the Ministry of Labour, Gender and Social Development, the lead agency of the development process in Uganda, as well as the Ministry of Health. Furthermore, CIDI is also a member of several networks such as UWASNET, Voices for Health Rights, PELUM, Ministry of Health Technical Working Group, Civil Society Budget Advocacy Group, NGO Forum, Uganda and National AIDS Service Organization, just to name a few.