Twenty-one persons made up of District Citizens Committee Members and selected opinion leaders in the Ejura Sekyedumasi Municipal Area in the Ashanti Region have undergone a day’s training in policy advocacy at the local level in Ejura.

The purpose of the workshop was to train participants in skills needed to advocate better maternal healthcare services in their respective communities.
It was also meant to prepare participants for district and regional level policy dialogues on the maternal health research report which was launched by SEND-Ghana in May 2014.
The training covered areas such as understanding the concept of policy advocacy, drafting an advocacy plan of action, steps in advocacy, clarifying advocacy, developing advocacy messages, coalition building and networking, making the most of the mass media, dealing with the opposition and follow up on advocacy issues.
Facilitating the training, Daniel Adotey, a Programme Officer at SEND-GHANA said that the policy advocacy phase of SEND-GHANA’s Participatory Monitoring and Evaluation Framework is aimed at directing specific messages to targeted audience at the district, regional and national level to demand change from the top to the bottom and vice visa. “It is therefore important to equip citizens and community leaders with the necessary advocacy skills to enable them participate in the advocacy processes at all levels since they are the people who are directly affected by the advocacy issues”.

A participant at the Workshop, Iddrisu Abdul Kadri who is a Muslim youth leader in Municipality said the workshop has been an eye opener for him and he has now come to a realisation that he as a youth leader can also play a role to improve the maternal health situation in the Municipality.

“The workshop has been very insightful, I am now going to be an advocate on maternal health in the Zongo communities in this Municpality” Iddrisu added.
The workshop was organised in collaboration with Centre for the Development of People (CEDEP) as a part of a Star-Ghana funded project called; Building Effective Advocacy for Improved Maternal Health Care Delivery in Ghana.

Source-SEND-GHANA