Turning Grass Root Data into Advocacy Tools

Turning grass root data into advocacy tools

Field professionals often do not know what to do with their observations, or consider them as unusable, once they have processed the data for their initial reporting. However, this information is precious and can be used to nurture strategies for outreach.

Stefan Ziegler is currently the head of a UN research unit in the Middle East, the Barrier Monitoring Unit (BMU) that aims to better document the impact of the West Bank Barriers on Palestine refugee communities and to strengthen advocacy for better access to land, livelihoods and services while building local capacity.

Through his work in various humanitarian and development contexts, he realised that much of the data collected by local and international stakeholders is lost once project proposals are sent off to donors or agency headquarters. Indeed, although they may readily understand the importance of field-based research, practitioners most often cannot find the tools to spread this vision by themselves, mainly because they are usually too busy in assisting vulnerable populations.

This has equally kept field professionals from conceptualising new ideas that could, on the long-run, be highly relevant for countries in transition to development. Indeed, these data may be useful for future studies, in documents for legal cases, important academic studies and above all, in advocacy for the very people for whom the data were collected in the first instance.

During Stefan Ziegler's latest work, he refined the methodology in accruing data and information for multiple purposes to serve the very same vulnerable populations. His team's continuous research and probing revealed that they had struck a field of study which had neither been described by practitioners nor the academic community.

They are now dedicating time to implement this concept in their daily work at the Barrier Monitoring Unit in the West Bank. In the course of this work, they have developed a number of useful tools for field professionals, researchers and programme managers.

Thanks to a number of academic partners in Europe and to the expertise of the NGOManagementSchool in Geneva, the importance of these tools was acknowledged and the first such course for "Advocacy through Field-Based Research" took place in June 2012, targeting humanitarian, human rights and development practitioners coming through Geneva.

Parallel to the training course, the visibility of the idea has attracted a number of professionals who have realised that the gap between early intervention and long-term development needs bridging. Since then, course contents have been defined by a team of academics now publishing their findings in a collection on technology's contribution to development processes, helping strew the idea further.

Additionally, some other providers of training and teaching courses have become interested in pursuing this "new field of inquiry". Stefan recently gave a one-day course at CornellUniversity in the United States summarizing the essential traits of the original 5-day course at NGOManagementSchool, thereby making it accessible to its postgraduate and faculty members. The Politecnico di Milano has equally expressed interest in offering this course to students in the second part of 2013.

It is most likely that work in humanitarian, human rights and development contexts will greatly benefit from turning grass root data into advocacy tools, making efforts more consistent and lasting in empowering the protection and development of populations.