Just back from Hanoi!

It’s been a long time between posts which is largely due to me playing catch up as a result of 10 days in Hanoi attending a number of ActionAid Meetings focusing on Campaigning, then our Annual Country Directors Meeting followed by a quick Asia Regional Meeting.

That’s a lot of meeting and certainly a lot of talking so what’s with that? One of the big outcomes from Hanoi is a buy in from ActionAid’s senior management on how we can become an international campaigning power house. We are already a respected voice as a force for social change and we have some great policy work at country and international level but there is a renewed determination to take our campaigning work to the international level.

There is a big groundswell of support in ActionAid for us to adopt a campaigning methodology which identifies a specific target that is constraining social change for the poor and excluded and then campaign against that target.

One of the big discussions we are having is how we can effectively campaign against multinationals as multinationals are one of the key obstacles to getting governments delivering on their responsibilities to respect, protect and fulfil people’s human rights. In many of the countries where we work one or more multinationals have more power than a government and certainly influence the actions of the government and we need to address this imbalance.

As a little bit of an aside, I participated in a debate at the World Bank Office in Sydney yesterday on the global food crisis and one speaker assessed the activities of multinationals  and concluded that profit in itself was a good word.  He may or may not be right but my opinion is that justice is a far more important word and we need to campaign against the activities of multinationals that deny justice to the poor and excluded people.

During the week our International Director for Human Security, Richard Miller and I, facilitated a discussion on how the organisation engages with violent conflict. This has been a difficult issue for ActionAid over the last few years.

We are pretty good at helping our rights holders when they are affected by violence and believe that our approach at providing services such as food, water and shelter in a way that restores dignity and builds human security works and we need to do more of that. We have however struggled with some big issues when it comes to preventing the eruption of violence.

There are some in the organisation who believe that NGOs can have limited effects on preventing violence at the national level as there are so many national and international factors that cause violence and NGOs will always struggle to impact in this space.

At the same time it has become very clear that as ActionAid is enabling people to work for social change, this process in itself causes conflict as we work with our rights holders to change the rules. We therefore have a responsibility to ensure to the very best of our abilities that this conflict does not lead to violence, as opposed to negotiation, as a method of resolving that conflict. I’m sure that we are going to be doing some exciting work in this space and ActionAid Australia’s work on protection and violence against women will be at the forefront.

Finally the meeting was a fantastic opportunity to meet and engage with our new Chief Executive, Joanna Kerr. In a few short days it was quite remarkable to see how much enthusiasm the leadership group  has for Joanna’s approach which emphasises the building of an organisational culture that is decisive, simple, focused, accountable, transparent and celebratory.

One thing is for sure, we are going to quickly build on ActionAid’s work on enabling women to claim their human rights.  The time has never been so right for ActionAid to do this and we are completely energised and looking forward to this journey so make sure you book your seat on the bus!