How polio campaigners won €55M for their fight

LONDON — The development community’s fight against polio is a high-profile success story. Once a disease affecting millions of people around the world, by 2017 polio was endemic in just three countries — Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Nigeria. Some experts have even started planning for when, rather than if, polio is defeated completely. “Star power makes a hell of a difference.” --— Nicholas Whyte, senior director, Brussels office of APCO Worldwide But progress comes with a hefty price tag. International donors have spent $15 billion in the past three decades, according to the Global Polio Eradication Initiative, and it will cost more to finish the job. Campaigners are working to maintain the pressure on politicians and donors to make sure money keeps flowing. In 2017, those efforts paid off when advocates secured a €55 million ($63 million) pledge from the European Union. Nicholas Whyte, senior director in the Brussels office of the consultancy APCO Worldwide, played a key role in that campaign on behalf of Rotary International, an NGO that APCO has been working with since 2013. Whyte shared some tips with Devex on where APCO advocacy had succeeded, and what he had learned about promoting development issues with the EU institutions. Find the politicians who will champion your cause Rotary International has a long-standing commitment to fighting polio, alongside its partners in GPEI, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, World Health Organization, and U.N.Children’s Fund. Rotary’s ability to reach members in more than 30,000 branches all over the world was crucial to the lobbying effort, according to Whyte, especially as some members of the European Parliament are also involved in Rotary in their home countries. “We had a ready-made sympathetic audience of MEPs, which is not something that everybody has,” he said. Thanks to grassroots lobbying by Rotary members, MEPs could then do some of what Whyte calls the “heavy lifting” — arranging meetings and events to make sure polio stayed high on the agenda of the European Commission, which ultimately administers the EU’s budget. Those events “were an excuse to bring in someone from the European Commission to respond to the demands from parliament and civil society for more to be done,” he said. They also helped civil society meet with other key partners in the fight against polio, including senior figures from WHO. Give yourself options By approaching MEPs from across Europe, APCO could see who was willing to work with it. This was part of a wider approach that Whyte described as “go broad before you go deep.” “It is wise to talk with as broad a coalition of potential allies as possible at quite an early stage, rather than pick one champion and ride with them,” he said. “Then move onto the stage of picking champions, of course, but I think you have to start broad to get a sense of the landscape and a sense of what is possible.” Seek out star power Politicians are important, Whyte stressed, but “star power makes a hell of a difference.” The Gates Foundation is a partner in the Global Polio Eradication Initiative, and Bill Gates’s presence at key moments of the negotiations was crucial. “When Gates comes to Brussels he meets with the commissioner [for international development], and he raises [polio eradication] along with other issues ... He has that kind of access.” Not every development cause will be able to call on Gates, but Whyte recommends that anyone lobbying for change should think about how to use the development world’s big hitters. “The bigger the names you can mobilize on your side, the more likely you are to succeed,” he said. “Some might think that a little unfair. Maybe it is. Unfortunately, it is part of the rules of the game under which we are operating.” He added: “A single actor with means, who has a specific interest and a specific issue, is able to more effectively put it on the agenda than, say, a medium-sized country whose priorities might be all sorts of other things.” Understand the institution you are lobbying Brussels “is a very open system,” Whyte said. “The stereotype of the closed-off, isolated bureaucrat, listening to nobody, could not be further from the truth.” Officials are actively looking for experts who will share their knowledge and help shape policy in the right direction, he explained: “The commission is actually a small bureaucracy. So you will probably find that on any issue you care to choose, there is really just one official who is working on it full time, and is dying for a decent conversation on the topic of their work.” However progress also depended on understanding the different attitudes within the commission, he stressed. For example, some saw the fight against polio as a useful way to build the infrastructure that is also needed to fight other diseases. “There were some people who felt that the vision of concentrating on polio eradication is fundamentally a good thing,” Whyte explained. “The structures that are set up to achieve this are then able to be used for future cases of epidemics [and] outbreaks of communicable diseases.” But other officials worried that focusing specifically on polio would turn attention and resources away from strengthening health services “in the round.” For Whyte, success lay first in understanding and then in navigating such differences. Ultimately, campaigners were able to celebrate the release of millions of euros and Rotary International, along with their partners, could move onto the next stage of the fight against polio.