Advocacy toolkit – a Roots guide

The word ‘advocacy’ has different meanings for different people in different contexts. 

People understand ‘advocacy’ in accordance with their experiences, their worldview, their language and their culture. Some people will see advocacy as beneficial, but other people may have had bad experiences and see advocacy as something to avoid. Assuming that another person understands ‘advocacy’ in the same way as we do can sometimes lead to miscommunication, so it is important to clarify a common understanding. There is no single correct interpretation of the word ‘advocacy’. 

Tearfund defines ‘advocacy’ as: ‘Influencing the decisions, policies and practices of powerful decision-makers, to address underlying causes of poverty, bring justice and support good development.’

Advocacy is never just about raising awareness of an issue, a problem or a situation. It is always about trying to seek change in the policies, practices, systems, structures, decisions and attitudes that cause poverty and injustice, so that they work in favour of people living in poverty.

Advocacy can be about individual cases of poverty and injustice – for example, campaigning to release people who have been wrongly imprisoned. It can also be about structural issues of poverty and injustice – for example, campaigning to cancel debt or improve the rules of global trade.