Making change in Zambia

Disclaimer: this is my longest blog post ever! Fill up your coffee and get comfortable. It contains reflections on my work in Zambia.

Today, I confronted the age-old social-political question head-on: is it easier to effect social change through grassroots activism or political advocacy? After a heated discussion bordering on argument with my supervisor, Dr. Bob, I gained new respect for the latter position and the advocacy work Dr. Bob does.

For the last month, Dr. Bob has been attending conferences in Europe on landmines and cluster bombs. He had left me with a vague assignment to profile people with disabilities in Lusaka. I had access to a small grant to carry out the project.

When I began my interviews, I encountered problems. Without a clear idea of how the project would be used and to what ends, I was unable to justify the project to the participants. They would ask, how will this project benefit my life? How do I know you’re not simply using my story to host another ineffective workshop or publish research for your own benefit?

From early on, the nature of the project changed. In consultation with disabled activists, I decided to transform the project into a grassroots awareness-raising campaign. I would still interview disabled people but the goal would be to design and produce small black-and-white posters, each one expressing a single voice, and to photocopy these posters in the tens of thousands to be distributed strategically around the country. With the objective to raise awareness about disability, I felt better about interviewing people and recording their stories.

Dr. Bob returned this week to a nearly completed awareness-raising campaign: I had finished 15 out of 20 posters, each one including a photograph, personal testimony and an applicable clause from the brand-new Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. We immediately began planning a launch for the campaign.

But today, our respective visions seemed at odds. Dr. Bob was underplaying my plan to photocopy the posters en masse and distribute them widely. Instead, he planned to use our limited funds to host a meeting for ministers and stakeholders to lobby for Zambia’s ratification of the Disability Rights Convention. Most of the money would go to the attendees as travel stipends.

It upset me that this money would be spent on well-to-do individuals when it could be put to photocopying more posters and broadening the scope of the campaign. At the height of our argument, I told him I didn’t want my project to end up as just another closed-door meeting. I told him the grassroots element was the reason people participated in the first place, and I’d be betraying them if I didn’t follow through.

Sparing you of the details (we spoke for over three hours), Dr. Bob made his position crystal clear. Grassroots activism, awareness raising, local initiatives – these are fine and good, but real change happens from above. Building allies in government and influencing policy brings about action.

He acknowledges the dirty tricks and questionable ethics involved in politics. Throughout our conversation, he repeatedly reminded me that the only reason Zambians attend workshops, meetings or launches (they’re all the same in Zambia, he says) is to make money. He waved down numerous strangers in the hospital cafeteria where we sat who all confirmed this claim. For government officials, attending meetings is actually a major source of income, making any workshop/meeting/launch that doesn’t include personal stipends doomed to failure. (Dr. Bob attributes this situation to the wave of HIV/AIDS research over the last 10 years; before HIV/AIDS, believe it or not, people used to attend meetings for free... for free!)

Dr. Bob is an advocate. He makes things happen by knowing the right people and pushing in the right places. As if to prove his point, he interrupted me during our conversation to say hello to a lady walking by, the wife of the Minister of Health. All good advocates are part-politicians, he said.

My work here has largely been to provide Dr. Bob with concrete advocacy tools. I have not always seen tangible results from my work, but its utility is now clearer to me.

In September, I wrote a draft national program for small arms control, based on research and information Dr. Bob made available to me. My document has been tabled at Zambia’s National Focal Point on Small Arms and Light Weapons, and Dr. Bob is using it to pressure police and government officials to implement new policies and programs.

In October, I wrote a draft national program for civil society action on disability, tailoring the program to the Disability Rights Convention, which Zambia has signed but not yet ratified. Dr. Bob presented this document to Norwegian donors and is using it to mobilize support for a nationwide Norwegian-funded disability program.

Most recently, I interviewed people with disabilities and documented their voices in the form of small posters. Dr. Bob and I still plan to photocopy and widely distribute these posters to raise public awareness about disability, but this is not his foremost concern, and I now understand why.

Dr. Bob sees potential in the project to garner political support. Hosting a meeting/workshop/launch might seem like a waste of money, and there won’t appear to be immediate results, but it will influence the Minister of Foreign Affairs to ratify the Convention, thus making Zambia legally bound to its provisions. Dr. Bob will make his best effort to use my project to make political changes. It’s what he does best.

Of course, there is a role for grassroots activism. I like to think that activists and government form a symbiotic relationship, each keeping the other and the system in check. Dr. Bob’s role, an indispensable one, is to communicate between the two. He speaks both languages – that of the activist and that of the politician. He makes activist concerns sound important to policymakers, translating activist aspirations into real policy. In developing countries like Zambia, where the courts are inefficient and the government only mildly accountable, the importance of direct, high-level advocacy is amplified.

Dr. Bob said he didn’t want to tell me the raw details described above because they would depress me. I’m glad he did – even if they indeed depressed me. Because although it’s depressing to know how politics and development work, it’s better to know than not to know. I came out of this conversation – and, to a large extent, out of the first three months of my internship – with a renewed respect for the advocacy work that Dr. Bob does. For me, Dr. Bob demonstrates the potential for social change through strategic relationship building and personal politics. This may not be the best or the only way to effect change, but it is one way.


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Update: I wrote this post a few days ago. Since then, Dr. Bob has informally secured the British Council of Lusaka as the venue for a launch and exhibit of the disability project in January. The launch will include members of parliament and ministers. Bob also arranged unlimited free photocopying through his contacts, so we’ll only have to buy ink and paper. It looks like both aims – the grassroots awareness campaign and the lobbying – are compatible after all, at least in this case.