BY STEWART TICHAONA MUCHAPERA

FP2030 East and Southern Africa Hub, in partnership with the Centre for Reproductive Health and Education (CRHE), recently conducted a three-day long SMART Advocacy training workshop just outside Lusaka.

SMART– Specific Measurable Attainable Relevant and Timebound (SMART) Advocacy is a targeted approach to creating incremental changes. SMART advocates identify near-term opportunities for change, and the decision-makers who can act on them.

SMART workshops like this are essential to ensuring mutual accountability and collaboration between CSOs and government stakeholders to achieve share family planning commitment.

Participants were selected from 12 local and international non-governmental organizations actively driving up modern contraceptives. Advance Family Planning (AFP) provided facilitation.

Peter Ngure, Advocacy, Accountability and Partnership Manager for the FP2030 East and Southern Africa Hub was the lead trainer. The workshop aimed to equip the Civil Society Organizations (CSO) with skills to engage leaders within Zambia to ensure full implementation of their FP2030 commitment.

Participants went through the nine-step model SMART Advocacy, which starts with the ask, identification of objectives and allies to drawing up of the action plan and managed to develop three objectives to support the full implementation of their commitment in line with national priorities. This includes initial stages like envisioning the advocacy objective to identifying allies and influencers and to the drawing of the action plan.

Speaking at the conclusion of the three-day training, Dr. Angel Mwiche, Director, Reproductive Health at Ministry of Health of Zambia, said his ministry was committed to bringing family planning to the center of national development and called for accountability from both the government and members of civil society.

“It is exciting to note that we now have several trainers from our own family planning pool. Going forward we should be able to draft advocacy objectives, plan, and execute them. However, a plan alone is not enough, and we should be able to strive for continuity and build from what we have achieved in 2012,” said Dr. Mwiche.

Zambia recently launched its FP2030 commitment, a costed implementation an investment case and the road map to reproductive maternal, newborn and child health interventions (RNCH) to position the country to build on past achievements. Zambia commits to spending $12 million in 2023 on family planning programming and subsequently increase funding by 30% annually. The government will support the generation of new data, improving the quality of and better use of existing data for family planning programming and decision making.

SMART workshops like this are essential to ensuring mutual accountability and collaboration between CSOs and government stakeholders to achieve share family planning commitment.