INTRODUCTION
Grassroots-based advocacy movements are not new and continue to be politically contentious. However, since the mid-1990s there has been an increasing interest in advocacy on the part of both NGOs and Northern donor agencies. Firstly, influencing macro-level policy and regulatory frameworks is now seen as essential to increasing opportunities and removing constraints at the micro-level for both enterprise programmes and entrepreneurs themselves. Secondly, multilateral and bilateral donor agencies have increasingly emphasised civil society development and democratisation as a means of effecting this macro-level change. Underpinning both these trends are related debates about rights-based approaches to development and pro-poor growth. Advocacy organizations have also used advances in communications and information technology to increase global as well as national visibility and influence.
Impact assessment has had a two-fold role in these trends:
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Firstly action research and impact assessments of the effects of macro-level policies, legislation and regulatory environments have been used to support advocacy campaigns.
Secondly donors, NGOs and advocates themselves have been concerned to assess the impacts of their advocacy strategies either to justify funding them and/or to improve future strategies and campaigns.
There are now a number of manuals by NGOs and donors presenting models, tools and frameworks for both advocacy itself and advocacy impact assessment.1
There is also now general official agreement that advocacy necessarily involves a grassroots process of empowerment. This is an explicit part of advocacy definitions in agencies as diverse as World Bank, USAID and grassroots NGOs. Donor practice has however so far been somewhat less supportive. In many donor agencies (multilaterals, bilaterals and INGOs) efforts have been confined to