Global Advocacy and Language

Effective global advocacy depends on participation, but participation, in most cases, depends on language. Global discussions require a global medium of exchange. Discussions can take place through interpreters and tools, but real, accessible and effective discussions require the fluidity of a shared language. And by default, it has been the English language – a language with a history that is global in many ways, but mostly for not-so-great reasons.

This will not be news to anyone, the author of this blog was not a native English-speaker and remembers the growing pains of being perceived through the filter of a poor mastery of the language first – no matter how clever or expert one is, it adds to nothing if ideas can’t be properly expressed. And I was lucky enough to get the chance to work on my English when I was young to get to a point professionally where the language feels natural most of the time. That process is still ongoing for me, and it takes years. But that shouldn’t mean being cut off from crucial information, being left out of the rooms where the discussions are taking place. Now working at the GFAN Secretariat, I tried to bring these experiences with me, and support the mission of the network to provide up to date technical information and give all of our members a chance to meaningfully participate in global discussion around the governance and implementation of global health. That objective is always in tension with inclusivity: if everything needs to be translated into several languages, we can’t release our information as quickly. If every call needs to have interpretation or be run several times in different languages, we have less capacity to do other things.  It’s a tough balance to find, but we try our best.

Starting in early 2025, we made more efforts towards inclusivity by increasing our output in French. We held French-first monthly calls, wrote French-first briefs and analyses and provided more French communications tools. We also strived to make more of our regular, English-first work available in French through translation and interpreters. The choice of French was informed, first and foremost, by a need for efficiency – there is a large group of francophone advocates in Global health, and our team has 4 francophone people on staff, allowing us to manage part of the work in-house. Of course, adding another colonial language to English isn’t a perfect solution, but it’s a step we could take and were glad we did.

Our timing was – regrettably – impeccable. We had not foreseen what 2025 would have in stock for Global health, but this year put into stark relief why all working in Global health should get the chance to keep an ear to the ground of global discussions, as politics in donor countries collided, especially violently, with the hard work of implementation. Francophone colleagues expressed deep interest in better understanding what was happening, what it all meant for their work, and how they could fight back – now looking back, we saw a clear awareness of the challenges and stakes of the USG MoU process and reprioritization across our francophone partners. Our French-first calls, our best measure of impact and interest, were packed all year, and we worked to ensure that we provided partners with information they wanted by co-organizing these calls with other groups wanting to outreach more directly to francophone advocates.

We come out of this strategic move with two key lessons:

1. Information trickles too slowly and too imperfectly from English to other languages. We usually find that our English-speaking network members want to dig deeper into the news of the day, on the other hand our work in French showed that access to the facts was already a challenge – and we often were the first to provide colleagues with adapted information about essential developments, even when we came in a week or more after the news-break.
2. Translation and interpretation are not a solution – they are useful tools and a good complement to the rest of the work, but we saw so much more interest in French-first tools and calls than we did in translations and interpretation of our regular work. Translation, with the use of new AI-enabled tools (combined with review by French speakers) allowed us to cut our costs and we hope to continue use them in the future. Interpretation needs to be done well or not at all, and we have been lucky to be able to work with excellent interpreters (and to have the funds to pay them, thanks to a grant from L’Initiative). However, we see much more interest and impact in French-first calls, where participants do not have to go through the filter of interpretation to express themselves, and feel more confident and our hope is to continue those as well.

If you joined us on this journey, thank you for your patience and interest – and we do hope you get in touch to let us know how we did, and what more we could do. For now, our French-first calls are still ongoing. We also have a French resources’ round-up every month! Interested in getting access to these resources? Write to the author of this blog!

– Quentin