Liliane Fonds wins Impact Challenge Award for its ‘Breaking down Barriers’ project

It is a great pleasure to share that this year the Liliane Foundation received the Impact Challenge Award for the project ‘Breaking down Barriers’! The Impact Challenge Award is a national award for Dutch charity organizations who have demonstrated the biggest development in the field of impact. According to the professional jury, the Liliane Foundation has done so through its project and has shared the learnings and finding in the best way with others.

‘Breaking down Barriers’ was initiated by the Liliane Foundation and the African Studies Centre (Leiden University) in 2015 to identify the success factors of advocacy for children with disabilities. Together with One Family People in Sierra Leone, The Cameroon Baptist Convention Health Services and Cheshire Homes Society of Zambia, and academic partners in those countries, the programme uses academic research as input to build capacity for effective disability advocacy. 

One of the learnings is the finding that children with a disability are often not only ‘left behind’ because they have an impairment, but they are disadvantaged by multiple sources of oppression: their age, gender identity, religion, class, race, and other identity markers. This notion, called intersectionality, recognizes that identity markers do not exist independently of each other, and that each informs the other, often creating a complex convergence of oppression. This insight is very important for the effectiveness of advocacy strategies, and opens up new alliances with stakeholders we, and our partners, might have missed before.

Interested to learn more about effective advocacy?
Check out www.barriersfree.org