MY EXPERIENCE: SOCIAL MEDIA FOR EVIDENCE BASED ADVOCACY

Hey Everyone,

I hope you are doing great. I was part of an event that took place last week and if you followed me closely on twitter, you’d have noticed I was live tweeting about an event I was participating in and also at the time, facilitating a session.

The fact that majority of the participants were far older than I am and from the far north, I was really skeptical about doing the session on social media but to my amazement at the end of the session, I had about five participants who registered twitter accounts and could not wait to start tweeting. It went well and I was really encouraged to talk about social media…..even in my sleep!

Theme of the seminar was: ‘Tackling undernutrition in Northern Nigeria: the importance of gender’ and the objectives were to raise awareness of the ‘silent crisis of malnutrition’ in (Northern) Nigeria, share and discuss evidence on the interaction between gender and nutrition in Northern Nigeria and consider ways in which participants can use the evidence in their programmes and advocacy.

Facilitators provided participants with some information on the scale and impact of malnutrition/undernutrition in Northern Nigeria. They also demonstrate how gender norms, roles and relations are an important contributor to child undernutrition and then, moved on to thinking how you we use this evidence and other relevant evidence in our work – whether advocacy or holding government accountable, raising public awareness or programme implementation.

I facilitated the session on ‘using evidence for advocacy’ where I emphasized on the use of successful social media strategies for evidence based advocacy.

The event was put together by ORIE, Working to improve Nutrition in Northern Nigeria (WINNN), Federation of Muslim Women Association of Nigeria (FOMWAN) and Civil Society Scaling Up Nutrition in Nigeria (CS-SUNN).

Note: When women are empowered with knowledge on nutrition, this positively affects the quality of life for the family and the community as a whole .