TB/MDR-TB Advocacy Tool Kit

his tool kit draws on years of experience of tuberculosis (TB) advocacy in the United Kingdom and abroad, and includes lessons learned in the field by the Advocacy Partnership, as well as desk-review. The purpose of the tool kit is to complement ongoing advocacy trainings delivered by the Advocacy Partnership and to be a resource for future in-country trainings. Designed for TB advocates and stakeholders, nurses, community workers, people and communities infected and affected by TB, and HIV/AIDS activists, the toolkit is intended to be a resource to help strengthen advocacy skills of TB stakeholders and their ability to design and deliver campaigns.

According to the publishers, it was created at the request of participants of the Advocacy Partnership trainings and from others participating in needs assessment studies. Many people recognised the need to package the many resources already available, but not necessarily accessible to everyone. Advocacy has a key role to play in raising the sense of emergency in the context of MDR-TB, to increase demand for services to tackle TB and Multi-drug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB - more effective diagnostics, second-line drugs, infection control measures etc.), to ensure respect for human rights in the context of MDR-TB, and more generally to accelerate action to deliver the Global Plan to Stop TB.

The toolkit includes the following sections:

• Section 1: What is advocacy?
• Section 2: Why advocacy? The main TB challenges
• Section 3: How to plan for successful advocacy
• Section 4: Who are we trying to influence?
• Section 5: Advocacy skills
• Section 6: Monitoring and evaluating advocacy work
• Section 7: Resource mobilisation for advocacy work
• Section 8: Resources