Laura Marshall - Nepal - Advocacy officer
Proper support for teachers results in good quality education for children. VSO Education volunteers working in the area of advocacy play a crucial role in raising awareness of the rights of teachers and campaigning to ensure governments are supporting teachers to do their job well. VSO advocacy volunteer, Laura Marshall tells us about her work.
Why advocacy is important
Advocacy is so important in development for two main reasons. Firstly, we can work at grass-roots level, in classrooms and with teachers to help realise change but if that message doesn’t go up the chain then systems never change.
As an example of this, I think we all know that actually there is enough food in the world to feed everybody, but still people are hungry. That’s because our systems aren’t working. So in education the first thing is to bring the information volunteers gather at a grass roots level back up the chain to national policy and international policy level.
Secondly, it really does make an enormous difference to people’s lives to give them a voice in the issues that affect them. In advocacy we use the power we have politically to give a voice to people who don’t have that power. For example, organisations like teachers’ unions here do not have a lot of power nationally and internationally, so we work with them to make sure the voices of teachers come through in political debate.
What you need to become an advocate
I think advocacy is a difficult volunteer job to advertise because people don’t necessarily understand what advocacy is. There are a lot of transferable skills. Many of the basics that you need for working in advocacy are people skills. It’s really working with people to understand their point of view and getting them together to communicate. If you’re good at looking at dense language, like policy documents and then taking them apart to ensure that 99 per cent of people can understand them, that makes you a good advocacy volunteer.
I love my job
I would say that it’s quite revolting how much I enjoy my job. I love the fact that if you’re offered an advocacy role then you have an opportunity to really build something very new. It’s not constrictive. You can make it very much your own. Also, you get to talk to people from all sorts of different places and again, that is fabulous.
The highs
There’re a lot of highs in advocacy work. Obviously, some of it is repetitive and it takes a long time for change to happen. But when change does come it’s such an enormous buzz and you realize because of the nature of the change it’s really going to mean something that will last long after you’re gone. When I was volunteering in Rwanda, just before I left, one of the teachers I was working with said, ‘VSO has really given a voice to teachers and before this we didn’t have a voice’. I think that might have been the proudest work moment of my life actually, because enabling someone to assert one of their basic human rights is an amazing thing.