How collective advocacy can amplify the voices of women and girls

Gender equality has long been a buzz phrase in the development community, but more needs to be done to include women's priorities and solutions in the most pressing development challenges. Women Thrive's Patricia T. Morris outlines five lessons on collective advocacy to leverage women's voices.

For too long, global decision-making has ignored or excluded women and girls’ voices in grass-roots advocacy. Collective advocacy can change that.

One of the largest critiques of the Millennium Development Goals crafting process is that it did not adequately include input from grass-roots advocates in developing countries. Despite the success of the MDGs, I’m convinced that some of the unrealized targets and pitfalls that emerged could have been avoided if more voices — and particularly women’s voices — had been at the decision-making table from the start.

Gender equality has been a buzz phrase in the development community for years now, but I know from more than 20 years in the business that we still need concerted efforts to include women’s priorities and solutions to the most pressing development challenges in equal numbers to men’s in policy development forums. It just doesn’t happen on its own.