Evaluating advocacy for achieving greater impact for children

Advocacy in UNICEF transcends mere definitions; it’s an impactful instrument embedded in all our programmes. Advocacy is pivotal in protecting child health, education, and protection. Our humanitarian advocacy paves the way for humanitarian access and facilitates cross-border agreements during emergencies.

UNICEF defines advocacy as “the deliberate process, based on demonstrated evidence to, directly and indirectly, influence decision-makers, stakeholders and relevant audiences to support and implement actions that contribute to realizing children’s and women’s rights”.

This involves raising social and behavioural change awareness, developing organizational support, communications, research and social mobilization. Evaluative growth is necessary to ensure that UNICEF’s advocacy remains a tool for transformative changes in governance, societal attitudes, and institutional functions, aiming at dismantling deep-rooted barriers to children’s rights. The ultimate objectives of our advocacy range from rectifying imbalances and disparities to championing human rights, social justice, and environmental well-being and bolstering democratic participation, particularly for children and women.

In this evaluation, UNICEF examines its advocacy approaches to support the implementation of the organization’s Strategic Plan, 2022-2025, and its capacity to measure the impact of advocacy efforts effectively.

Advocacy requires organizing and organization. It represents a set of strategic actions and, at its most vibrant, will influence decisions, practices and policies towards child protection. Thus, the scope of the evaluation encompassed multiple organizational levels and focused on adapting the advocacy approaches in different contexts. To this end, this evaluation sought to answer two principal inquiries: How can UNICEF increase the success of its advocacy efforts? What can be done to ensure that our advocacy approaches lead to measurable results?

Five specific criteria were evaluated for this analysis.

First, coherence and, specifically, the measure of UNICEF’s clear and shared definition of advocacy in conjunction with the field’s best practices. Coherence also informs how UNICEF can advocate evaluatively. This promotes the evaluation ‘process use’, which strengthens UNICEF’s ownership of an organizational understanding of advocacy among relevant stakeholders.

The second criterion was relevance to the policies that guide UNICEF’s advocacy. This measured the alignment with the Gender Action Plans and other areas of the UNICEF mandate, the Strategic Plan 2022–2025 and the main global United Nations frameworks. The evaluation also analyzed UNICEF’s contribution to the combined advocacy work within the UN system. Next, UNICEF’s advocacy implementation capacity was evaluated threefold. The first two measures were of the extent to which current resources are adequately allocated for the implementation of the advocacy approaches and achieve expected results. This criterion also encompassed a third point of reference: the institutional understanding of the different advocacy roles, responsibilities and accountability for effective coordination and partnerships.

The fourth criterion was the validity of the design. The methodology emphasized assessing the quality of UNICEF’s advocacy change strategy design. This assessment reviewed its alignment with prevailing conditions, key objectives, strategies, and primary implementation methods that were translated seamlessly into real-world practice. The analysis offers recommendations to optimize UNICEF’s advocacy evaluation by 2025 and leverage findings from the formative evaluation to present a holistic set of suggestions for UNICEF to enhance this evaluation.

The last criterion was system adequacy. This measures how well advocacy planning, monitoring and evaluation, reporting systems and procedures are emphasized. This is to ensure meaningful advocacy approaches and initiatives that provide adequate guidance for effective decision-making.

In addition to the five tailored criteria and the generation of a theory-based, utilization-focused, participatory evaluation, the exercise also considered a complexity-aware system thinking approach. In practice, this requires a methodological robustness determined in response to an increased awareness of the complexity of the global environment. This develops a cumulative focus on establishing multilevel interlinkages towards the advocacy plan. Nonlinear and complex linkages, as well as secondary priorities, were considered. The methodology explored how such interactions are considered in the design of advocacy approaches, particularly in the existing theories of change.

Rigorous quality assurance measures were implemented to guarantee the precision of our data-gathering tools. Category definitions for qualitative data were clarified using rubrics and ensuring a unanimous understanding of all essential concepts among the evaluation team members. Evidence confidence was also assessed. This involved providing the quality, validation, and triangulation of evidence sources for each key finding. Specifically, this required a combination of qualitative strategies of content and discourse analysis and quantitative strategies of descriptive and inferential statistical analysis.

Research techniques ranged from focus group discussions, benchmarking, and social networking analysis to desk research and online surveys. As such, the data-gathering tools used to execute these exercises were as follows: KII protocols, analytical frameworks and matrices, observation diaries and notes, scoring tools and indicators, review notes, and questionnaires.

Ultimately, the substantial evidence foundation of this evaluative exercise was essential to gain a reasonable view and understanding of UNICEF’s advocacy efforts. The methodological strategies used are a testament to UNICEF’s commitment to evidence-based institutional growth in advocacy.

Please look forward to more blogs on the meaningful recommendations provided by this landmark evaluation.