group workshop © Progressio

Making sure that poor people have a say in the decisions and policies that affect their lives.

The majority of people around the world do not have an opportunity to participate in decisions and policies that affect their lives. We work to ensure that people can have a bigger say, and support partner organisations to become more effective in representing people's interests.

Progressio works with a broad range of civil society organisations - farmers' organisations, disability groups, women's organisations, grassroots and community based organisations - and supports these organisations to become more effective.

Our work in Latin America and the Caribbean

Marginalised people are least likely to participate in governance structures, exacerbating their poverty and reducing accountability. Progressio works with some of the most vulnerable groups, including women, young people, Afro-descendants and indigenous people, to help give them the skills and confidence to empower themselves.

Our development workers work with partner organisations to provide leadership training to local leaders from poor rural and urban communities. This training equips them to play an active, meaningful role in governance: making their voices heard, influencing decision-making, and carrying out their own development initiatives.

We also tackle the systems that marginalise people. In Central America, organisations that we support have played a key role in developing participatory planning and budgeting processes that are now being widely used to promote accountability. And through our development workers, we help ensure people can use these processes, supporting individuals and groups to articulate and demand their needs and rights.

Case study - southern Africa

In Zimbabwe, Progressio worked with local partners - including the Crisis in Zimbabwe Coalition, which groups together 350 Zimbabwean organisations - to raise issues of human rights abuses and promote dialogue on ways out of the country's deepening crisis. We have also worked with the Farm Community Trust of Zimbabwe to prepare a lobbying document on the conditions of farm workers following the government's controversial land reform programme.

Progressio development worker Irene Banda worked with the Bulawayo branch of the Zimbabwe Parents of Children with Disabilities Association (ZPCDA), which ran publicity events under its theme 'Towards a Barrier Free World'. A number of ZPCDA members got access to affordable housing and got their children into schools, while the branch established positive contacts with civic leaders and government departments.

Forward Mlotswa from Zimbabwe, himself a disabled person, has worked with the Namibian network of disabled people, NFPDN. The network lobbied successfully for the creation of a post of special advisor on disability in the office of the prime minister.