The policy and advocacy department of CIDI seeks to empower communities to positively influence national policies and practices towards improvement of their living conditions. It considers community empowerment to be community ownership, management and control of their life choices. By harnessing communities with skills to monitor and evaluate their development, they become capable of monitoring the development process on their own. This ability and the motivations that it engenders enables them to independently sustain their development outcomes.

Picture above: Community dialogue of our Advocacy project in Nakasangola District funded by USAid

 It is against this background that CIDI formulated the strategic indicators for the lobbying and advocacy department as follows:

1.  To create awareness on issues of policy rights and entitlements of water, hygiene and sanitation, food security and health.

2.  To enhance the capacity of communities to engage in policy processes on pertinent issues affecting agriculture, conflict resolution and peace building, health promotion, human rights awareness, water sanitation and hygiene, gender issues and any disasters that may come up.

3.  To strengthen research, documentation and information dissemination on issues that affect agriculture, conflict resolution and peace building, health promotion, human rights awareness, Water Sanitation and Hygiene, gender issues and any disasters that may come up.

4.  To lobby and advocate the duty bearers at all levels as regards issues on agriculture, conflict resolution and peace building, health promotion, human rights, Water Sanitation and Hygiene gender issues and any disasters that may come up.

 All activities aimed at enabling people to have themselves a positive impact on their standard of living, are found across all thematic areas of CIDI:

• Capacity building of the communities and dutybearers .
• Promote community participation in planning processes and  monitoring of development programmes by both private players and government.
• Conflict resolution and peace building.
• Promotion of equity and inclusion of vulnerable groups.
• Rights awareness through different strategies like rooted democracy, citizen’s led initiatives and action among others.
• Acknowledgement and promotion of public roles and responsibilities 

It is in line with the above indicators and activities, that CIDI has a Memorandum of Understanding with the Ministry of Labour, Gender and Social Development, the lead agency of the development process in Uganda, as well as the Ministry of Health.  Furthermore, CIDI is also a member of several networks such as UWASNET, Voices for Health Rights, PELUM, Ministry of Health Technical Working Group, Civil Society Budget Advocacy Group, NGO Forum, Uganda and National AIDS Service Organization, just to name a few.