Intersectional lobby and advocacy toolkit

Effective advocacy requires a well-structured approach, especially when addressing complex issues like sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) through an intersectional lens. Explore the steps outlined below to navigate your advocacy journey, ensuring that your efforts are inclusive, impactful, and sustainable.

The primary purpose of the tool is to help demystify intersectionality. To help users understand the meaning of intersectionality beyond a buzzword with no substance or power to change anything. The tool provides an explainer, exercises and resources to deepen understanding of intersectionality and facilitate its integration into SRHR advocacy that promotes a vision of everyone enjoying their SRHR freely.

This tool contains a checklist for organising a training session or course that works towards change. It helps the trainer, facilitator or organiser to prepare the training, while being aware of the different aspects needed for a fruitful learning environment with an intersectional approach. Checking starts from the moment a training is planned, and can be used to track its progress from preparation to implementation and evaluation.

The main objective of the intersectionality self-assessment tool is to encourage organisations to undertake a thorough self-evaluation and to assess their current level of commitment to diversity, inclusion, equity and social justice. It provides guidance and resources to help organisations identify areas for improvement and develop a roadmap towards becoming a more equitable organisation.

The Meaningful Youth Engagement (MYE) tool is a guide to effectively involving young people in youth-focused programmes. Its goal is to identify some of the gaps in planned youth participation, and to offer practical solutions alongside scenarios for making youth participation an essential part of any youth programme. The tool also recognises the role of stakeholders and duty bearers in advocating for youth voices.

A community scorecard (CSC) is a citizen-driven accountability measure for assessment, planning, monitoring and evaluation of service delivery. The Make Way programme wants to use an intersectionalised CSC (ICSC) to promote the engagement of youth with compounded vulnerabilities with duty bearers and other power holders. Its purpose is to improve the acceptability, accessibility, affordability and quality of SRH services. So the ICSC has been designed to complement conventional supply-side mechanisms of accountability by bringing together youth and service providers. First, to identify underlying obstacles to effective SRHR service delivery, and then to develop a shared strategy for their improvement.

The Intersectional See-Judge-Act (ISJA) tool aims to facilitate analysis of religious SRHR issues. It does so by using religious texts to initiate a community-centred discussion of the issues, their impact and actions that need to be taken to address any barriers identified, so that no one is left behind in accessing their SRHR. The tool can be used in diverse religious contexts, as its goal is personal, social and systemic transformation, and not converting people to a particular religion.

This tool helps you to develop a well-founded intersectional communication and media strategy for your lobby and advocacy work. It takes you through 10 steps, from setting objectives to constructing key messages, choosing the right formats and channels, and engaging external media. Going through all the steps will enable you to draw up a comprehensive strategy that you can immediately implement.

This Intersectional Messaging tool helps advocates put the principles of intersectionality into practice in their messaging. It provides guidance on developing messages that recognise diversity and complexity, centre the voices of those who are most minoritised, use respectful language, build collective power, and create positive and empowering narratives.

Part of intersectional SRHR advocacy is communicating with your target audience to raise awareness, activate them or increase the visibility of your organisation. This tool will help you to make your communication accessible, meaningful and usable for as many people in your target audience as possible. It applies to written communication, presentations, videos, social media posts and events.

If youth-relevant policies and plans are to be successful, they must be supported by appropriate budgets for their implementation. That’s where the budget analysis tool comes in. It allows you to monitor – and possibly influence – budgets throughout the whole budget cycle. The tool looks at how the budget is allocated and whether that is in line with national and international standards.

The Intersectionality-Based Policy Analysis (IBPA) tool aims to help you analyse policies, action plans and strategic documents at national or subnational levels. This analysis looks at how policies or plans have taken into account the priorities of the Make Way programme: SRHR, youth, intersectionality and accountability. Information gained from the analysis should contribute to better policies over time, and to minoritised youth being in a stronger position to claim their rights.