Telling The True African Story: Draft Africa Regional Communication Strategy 2005-2007

To support their country and community programmes, ActionAid has developed a communications function that is expected to facilitate their work in creating a platform to amplify the voices of the economically poor and excluded. The Africa Regional Communication Strategy is grounded in a commitment to empower country programmes to develop and run their own media agenda with the aim of meeting the following objectives:

• creating a platform to ensure the inclusion of the marginalised voices at all levels - international, national, regional, and sub-regional;
• affecting the powerful at all levels - international, national, regional, and sub-regional;
• building solidarity, particularly with civil society movements, to fight for a new order through communicating areas of partnership, particularly with intergovernmental agencies.

The strategy will focus on supporting research, media tools and skills, and capacity within countries to allow them to drive their own agenda so as to ensure that ActionAid’s communication activities “are not merely extractive but have a solid community participation component.”

The strategy aims to: 1) address the gap between what policy decision makers – governments, donor agencies, and multilateral agencies - commit to do and what is actually achieved on the ground, and 2) use these issues to raise awareness and drive advocacy for concerted pro-economically poor actions and policies. Key audiences that this strategy is designed to reach are: policy makers; the mass audience; and the global audience.

The following are key areas of engagement.

1. Strengthening policy advocacy through communication tools to ensure that advocacy and campaign work is addressing key African institutions.
2. Capacity building to ensure that skills and knowledge on communication tools and strategy is shared across the organisation, particularly in the specific countries identified.
3. Ensure communications strategy coordination across themes.
4. Build partnerships with key organisations to help create a platform of exchange, where the economically poor can be heard.
5. Disseminate the achievements of thematic and policy sections.