Project Directors, working under the partnership for advocacy in child and family health at scale, (PACFaH@Scale), participated in a two -day training workshop held June 14-15 at the dRPC-PAS office in Abuja, to improve their skills in leadership and advocacy communication as part of the ongoing capacity-building initiative for partners in the project. The workshop was designed to increase participants’ skills on how to initiate and sustain advocacy targeted at decision makers in key constituencies – the executive and the legislature.

Training Methodology
The workshop was interactive. It employed a variety of methods to build skills. This included role plays, group assignments, presentations and discussions in plenary. For example, participants were assigned into three study groups with four thematic activities, namely, a role-play assignment individual reflection activity (memories/knowledge), presentations at group level, and plenary debriefing.

Key Learnings
Participants acknowledged, following an analysis of pre-test and post-test workshop questionnaires and individual feedback, learning how to strategically develop and deliver messages to policy makers. In addition, participants learnt how to use specialized skills and competencies to build, follow-up, review and evaluate advocacy and communication initiatives within the PAS project. The participants also learnt about innovative ways of communicating with advocacy targets, credibility of the information channelled to advocacy targets, importance of brevity and timeliness of messages, how to analyse the advocacy messages, and how to collaborate with the media. A consultant, Malam Umar Kawu who is a leadership management trainer facilitated the workshop.

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