African Development and Advocacy Centre, AFRIDAC is an organisation that works towards empowering the African and Afro-Caribbean community in the UK and advocating on issues that disproportionately affects the community. AFRIDAC provides a platform and voice for the African community by influencing social change through research, community collaboration, policy engagement and capacity building.
Our core goal is to serve as a platform and a voice for the African and Afro-Caribbean in diaspora communities. We believe in fairness, equity, justice, accountability, transparency, openness, dignity, and respect for all ethnicities as humans. Over the last 12 years, we have refined our vision, mission, and objectives as an organisation. This has greatly influenced the spread of our services and the impact we have made in our community.
To epitomize the value of participation, research, and inclusion in resolving developmental challenges confronting the African race.
To harness the limitless potential of the mind through reflection, disruption, and inflection.
AFRIDAC started as an idea by the founder in 2009. As an immigrant who arrived in London in November 2006, he experienced discrimination and institutional racism in different forms such as a hostile immigration environment, skewed immigration policies against non-EU migrants, no recourse to public fund (NRPF), limited job prospect due to foreign degrees, absence of culturally appropriate services for Black migrants, and no African migrant organisation championing the needs of the community.
On this backdrop of negative personal experiences and stories shared by other diaspora African migrants in London the need to create an organisation to influence social change through research, community collaboration, policy engagement and build the capacity of community members became urgent. On 7 February 2011, African Development and Advocacy Centre, AFRIDAC was formally registered as a Company Limited by Guarantee with Companies House, UK with company registration number 07519121
Between 2011 and 2018, AFRIDAC focused on international development and advocacy work. We collaborated with the O’Neill Institute, Georgetown University DC, and other organisations as part of a global campaign for a proposed Framework Convention on Global Health (FCGH) – a global treaty based on human rights and aimed at national and global health equity. The framework is focused on all people, wherever they live, to enable easy access to comprehensive universal health coverage in a health system that does not discriminate. AFRIDAC drafted the advocacy strategy for the global campaign; organised and presented a side session at the 2016 World Health Assembly in Geneva.
After the global economic crisis in 2018, AFRIDAC began to look more inward to the UK and worked more in the areas of national advocacy on issues that disproportionately affected the African migrants and diaspora communities. AFRIDAC worked more closely with community members by empowering them through training, capacity building and policy engagement.
A tipping point for the Black community in the UK was the effect of Covid-19 pandemic. It disproportionately affected the Black community with high rate of infection, deaths and exposure to the virus as front-line workers. Further effects on the community included rising food insecurity, unemployment, restricted access to culturally competent services, homelessness, rise in domestic violence cases, digital divide, unsupported undocumented migrants, prolonged illness, mental health problems, and grief. In our quest to get evidence-based information we commissioned research to investigate the ‘Mortality rate because of Covid-19 for individuals of African and Caribbean background who are key workers’.
Fairness – no prejudgement. Allowing our service users to have a voice and input in the planning of out projects and interventions.
Equity – Our services are accessible and inclusive to meet the needs of all service users.
Justice – Advocating for equality and fairness for all service users.
Dignity & respect – We treat our service user as individuals promoting dignity and respect for all.
Openness and transparency – A flexible approach encouraging service users in co-designing our services to meet their needs.
Accountability – We are committed to a culture of reporting and sharing the impact of services and meeting all statutory and legal requirements.
AFRIDAC has grown organically since 2009 and registered in 2011 as a Limited by Guarantee not-for-profit in the UK.
With the growing hostile environment, an aspect of AFRIDAC’s advocacy work relates to analysis of immigration and housing policies that affects documented and undocumented African and Afro-Caribbean migrants.
AFRIDAC have been part of a growing advocacy against racial inequality in the UK. We have worked within the community to capture lived experiences of people and co-produced projects on issues that reflects those realities.
