As a human rights advocacy organization we will employ the following strategies:
Collaboration and partnership
Experience over the years has shown us that there is great value in team work through collaboration, partnership and coalition building. Working through platforms enables us to benefit from the resources, knowledge, skills and expertise of other civil society groups and institutions that are part of these platforms. CDHR is a member of several civil society advocacy platforms working on different sectors across the country and abroad. We will continue to work with/through coalitions in the pursuit of our mandate, whilst we continue to explore opportunities for establishing more partnerships with like-minded organiztions and institutions.
Communication and knowledge management
Communication and knowledge management are at the very fabric of the implementation of this strategy. Communication is at the centre of our work. We communicate every day with our staff, with our partners, with our donors and with the communities that we work in. It is through effective communication that we can be able to achieve our collective objectives and stay cohesive. Also, we consider knowledge management to be key in our work if we are to continue to be a learning organization. We will put the necessary structures and processes in place to ensure that we have the ability to receive information, process and transform it into explicit knowledge, which we can then be made accessible to our staff, partners and local communities to enhance their knowledge. In order words, we do not only believe in creating knowledge, but also in sharing it.
Capacity building
Capacity building is a culture in CDHR. Our approach to capacity building is to ensure that the capacity-building events/actions (whether it is training, mentoring, shadowing, etc) are relevant to the individual, programmes, CDHR, and the communities as a whole. We don’t want people to acquire skills, knowledge, and resources that they do not need/use in the discharge of their duties. It will have amounted to a waste of time and resources. In order to avoid this situation, all capacity-building interventions will be preceded by capacity needs to ensure that only the appropriate people/communities will benefit.
Non-violent engagements
As a human rights civil society advocacy organization, we believe in civility in carrying out our mandate. We will only use peaceful means to seek the social change that we desire to see in our communities. Our non-violent approach to advocacy is driven by the fact that non-violence is safe, effective and an enduring way to defeat injustice. And we are very well aware that it takes knowledge, courage and determination to achieve the desired results using the non-violent path.
Research, Documentation, and Publication
We want to move our advocacy work away from anecdotes to evidence-based. Evidence-based advocacy is safer and more effective because the advocates will have acquired vast knowledge of the subject matter and are advocating from an informed position. We will undertake/commission regular thematic research on different areas of our work to enable develop us strong advocacy messages and to develop a database against which we will measure the successes or otherwise of our interventions. We will continue to strengthen our research unit by capacitating our staff and partners. We will document our research findings/reports and share them with like-minded organizations here in Sierra Leone and abroad.
Supporting Community Livelihoods
We will make our community development interventions participatory with the aim of ensuring that community livelihoods are sustainable. . We will create space for community participation in the designing, planning, and implementing community livelihood programmes. The people are at the centre of our work. We want them to take ownership of our interventions, whether they originate from them or from us. We will work with them to identify the community assets that they have and support them to develop and use those assets for their own benefits and for the benefit of their communities. It’s going to be collaborative engagements.
Monitoring and Evaluation
We consider monitoring and evaluation as not only a way of gathering information on how a project or intervention is doing/has done, but also as a transparency and accountability mechanism. Our focus is not just on tracking project inputs and outputs such as activities, finances, reports, and logistics, but also to keep track of the results and changes that the project/intervention has brought about. Monitoring and evaluation will help organizations to establish a body of knowledge on the core areas of their work that will contribute to knowledge building and to draw lessons that will inform future engagements.