Advocacy at global level: Lessons learnt from AIDS advocacy

Abstract

Objective: To show a practical definition of advocacy and to illustrate the characteristics of AIDS advocacy at global level as an example of its practice.
Contents: Advocacy is an activity to facilitate the formation of public policy and its changes. It consists of four major activities: protection of rights, policy recommendations, lobbying, and advocacy marketing. At global level, AIDS advocacy is a well-known activity and it has helped to achieve a huge increase of AIDS financing from a few hundred thousand dollars in 2000 to about 15 billion dollars in 2013. Moreover, the rate of new infection has been decreased by 38% from 2000 to 2010. To evaluate such advocacy activities, 6-point framework is available. Out of six, ‘shift in social norm’ and ‘changes in impact’ are comparatively easy to measure and we have seen how effective it is to use these two. However, this strong advocacy seems to affect other disease control measures such as non-communicable diseases, as they are not equally financed for developing countries.
Conclusion: Advocacy is powerful, but it is not a panacea. An advocacy might create an unbalanced situation of budget allocation for the whole health sector. Mediation is still lacking for this at global level. When we conduct advocacy activities, we should consider both the positive and negative aspects of advocacy.