When Neva Frecheville joined CAFOD in November 2012, the role included co-chairing the Beyond 2015 with her friend and colleague, Mwangi Waituru, and convening advocacy for the Participate initiative, a global network of 18 organisations aiming to bring high quality evidence on the reality of poverty into the post-2015 debate.
Anyone who has hung around with Dominic Haslam for long enough in the last four years knows well just how central a role Beyond2015 played in his professional life in that period. He was delighted to be asked to write a blog about the experience, in response to the comprehensive evaluation.
A fiscal agent for all partners and taxpayers? Yes, initially successfully located in the North and subsequently located in the global South with a responsibility to serve the work of the Beyond 2015 Campaign on all continents. While the flow of development aid and finance is usually from the North (developed countries) to the South (developing countries), the Beyond 2015 Campaign chose, on merit and after a competitive process, a unique organisation as its fiscal agent: the Africa Disability Alliance (ADA) based in Pretoria, South Africa.
Reviewing the advocacy work of a campaign such as Beyond 2015 is not an easy task. As expressed in the campaign’s external evaluation: “The legacy of any advocacy campaign goes well beyond words. Having said so, UN officials and representatives of Member States seem to have genuinely welcomed and thoroughly considered the inputs of the campaign”.
How to build a global campaign? Good question! This evaluation will give you incredible insight about critical lessons we learned from the Beyond 2015 experience. In essence, it outlines how to build a global campaign. When Beyond 2015 was in its beginnings there was no manual for how to set up an international civil society campaign.