HSRC researchers have made key breakthroughs in designing a high-impact policy advocacy framework for the National Development Agency (NDA). The framework includes a policy advocacy cycle (PAC) suggestion to guide policy activism in practice. When presented at a recent progress review meeting, the suggested PAC sparked a lively conversation with NDA project leads.

The draft PAC includes five steps, starting with advocacy inputs and concluding with monitoring and evaluation as illustrated in Figure 1. Without fit-for-purpose advocacy inputs (evidence to inform advocating for policy change), the NDA will struggle to offer grounded and feasible solutions to policy problems. The second step involves feeding these inputs into advocacy platforms and channels to facilitate policy engagements, a crucial third step in the PAC. This step includes proactive engagements with decision-makers and policy change champions at critical intervention points. The fourth step in the cycle promotes policy change by integrating solutions to the policy problem into overhauled or new policies. The concluding step, monitoring and evaluation, ensures continuous learning and impact measurement through formative and summative evaluations of the advocated policy reforms.

Figure 1: Policy Advocacy Cycle (PAC) – NDA’s major steps for self-sustaining policy reforms

The five high-level steps in the draft PAC (see Figure 1) are interactive and require a mindset shift in the NDA, which needs to realign its internal structures to ensure that the advocacy guidelines and tools yield desirable results in practice. It has been assembled from best practices used in global and local advocacy models, adapted for insider advocacy of public entities and outsider advocacy of civil society actors central to the NDA mandate.

The following link explains some background of this initiative: https://hsrc.ac.za/news/equitable-education-and-economies/nda-study-update-bridging-gaps-between-research-advocacy-and-institutional-practice/