Quotes from Peer Exchanges
Below are a number of quotes from the Beneficiary Voice peer exchanges that took place from 2008-2009, which will form part of a new set of guidance notes on how to involve beneficiaries in campaigns.
Overall
"NGOs deliver quality work when their work is based on a sensitive and dynamic understanding of beneficiaries' realities; responds to local priorities in a way beneficiaries feel is appropriate; and is judged to be useful by beneficiaries".
Bond Quality Group
Involvement in Governance Structures:
"We speak to Kuapa Kokoo where the farmers own the company and have ultimate control. However they do not have expertise in marketing to people in the UK. The way we work is to have strong accountability structures and also to demarcate expertise within this."
Tom Allen, Trading Visions
Consulting with Partners
"The partners
were positive about it, saw it as a valuable opportunity to lobby CAFOD, and saw
it as an advocacy success that we decided to focus on
extractives."
Clare Lyons,
CAFOD
Autonomous action groups
"We don't want to extract the partner's voice and regurgitate it when it suits us. We want to empower the people we work with."
Graham Bennett, One World Action
Direct Advocacy
"The BAs were experts in the human effects of cluster munitions ... they brought specific experience which helped elaboration of Victim Assistance clause ... I learnt a lot from them as they could tell me how things work on the ground and they raised several things I hadn't thought of'.
Diplomat quoted in Ban Advocates Evaluation
Retelling stories
"When I am told stories I react emotionally and this is reflected when the story is retold."
Participant in Peer Exchange, 2008
Speaker Tours
"In my experience there is nothing more powerful than meeting with someone directly affected by something. Enabling communication between someone in UK that wants to make change happen and someone abroad trying to make change happen is deeply inspiring"
Jenny Dawkins - Street Child World Cup
Images
model
"We are very desensitised to sanitised, manufactured
charity adverts. This is far more affecting"
Matt Daw -
PhotoVoice
Using New
Media
"The spread of New Media technology means that
bringing voices from the Global South to decision makers in the North should
easier than at any point in history"
Participant in Bond Southern Advocacy Group
Ways to find partners/beneficiaries
"Intended beneficiaries often do not know they are being advocated for; in many cases they do not have a say about who will advocate on their behalf and have little influence over their advocates...
...Talking to intended beneficiaries and understanding their perception of impact is even more difficult than in development projects, where they are at least participating in a direct way."
(Christian Aid in http://www.actionaid.org.uk/_content/documents/advocacyscoping_english.pdf )
Overcoming problems
"How someone tells a story reflects the identity that has been imposed upon them. Part of Beneficiary Voice in Campaigning is working with affected parties for them to choose their own consciousness."
Jenny Dawkins - Street Child World Cup
