Overview

The Right2Know Campaign launched in August 2010 as a coalition of organisations and people responding to the Protection of State Information Bill (the Secrecy Bill). The Campaign quickly broadened its scope to tackle related issues. R2K is a coalition of NGO and social movement: has both staff (for some stability and continuity) as well as voluntary activism. It tries to be ‘rooted on the ground’ in working class communities and organisations. R2K works with over 100 organisations in SA.

Purpose

R2K is guided by principles of social, economic and environmental justice.

The coalition considers free expression and access to information to be the building blocks of an accountable democracy that is able to deliver on the basic needs of its people. Their activities are directed towards protecting these rights.

Target group

Civil society; coalition members and their constituencies

Focus areas

• Stop the Secrecy Bill
• InfoAccessNow!: supports communities and groups to access information critical to their broader struggles for social justice
• Media freedom for All: campaigns promote the media sector by monitoring and responding to legislative developments and by educating and organising activist organisations on these issues
• Justice for Whistleblowers: Linking whistleblowers to appropriate partner organisations for legal support and advocacy
• Right to Communicate: campaigns for the realization of the right to communicate as a basic human right against the profiteering by cellphone companies that make communication too expensive for the majority of people

Approach

In the main, R2K does education through campaigns on specific issues. R2K draws extensively on mass media and social media, ie. Radio, newspaper, cell-phones and social media sites; but also marches and pickets, public meetings and workshops.

R2K aspires to the idea of the ‘campaign as a university’. R2K draws on the Freirean tradition in terms of starting with people’s lived experiences and building collective agency. In order to build capacity for a democratic organisation they run education on how to chair a meeting and guide discussions, and democratic decision making processes and accountability.

There is a recently formed ‘popular education task team’ that aims to use movies on key issues facing South African working class communities and activists to stimulate discussion and political debates - this is based on the assumption that there is a lack of reading culture in South Africa!