Oromo organizations do not need to merge. They need a durable method for acting together on shared international concerns.

Diaspora Organizations as Bridges

Diaspora communities, through their various organizations, preserve ties to a homeland. Their organizations serve as bridge institutions. They help communities maintain language, culture, family connections, and mutual support while also connecting experiences in the homeland to institutions in the countries where diaspora communities live. Research on diaspora engagement shows that their contributions extend beyond remittances to humanitarian relief, knowledge and skills transfer, public communication, cultural representation, policy advocacy, and diplomacy. In practice, diaspora organizations can explain events, mobilize citizens, brief officials, engage international institutions, work with journalists and civil-society partners, and keep attention on issues after a news cycle has moved on.

Their position between societies can be especially valuable in advocacy. Diaspora organizations often understand the language, political institutions, and public debates of their countries of residence while retaining knowledge, relationships, and commitments connected to the homeland. That allows them to act as interpreters and intermediaries: translating experiences into forms that lawmakers, human-rights bodies, media organizations, universities, churches, professional associations, and other institutions can understand and use. As the Migration Policy Institute has emphasized, diaspora advocacy can operate across several arenas at once rather than through government lobbying alone.

But diaspora presence does not automatically become diplomatic influence. Political scientists Shubha Kamala Prasad and Filip Savatic examined 110 diaspora communities in the United States and found that only 38 had formed formal foreign-policy interest groups. Their broader lesson is straightforward: numbers, concern, and mobilization matter, but sustained influence requires people and institutions willing to organize, maintain relationships, and continue the work overtime.

For the Oromo diaspora, this distinction is important. The question is not whether organizations exist or whether Oromo communities care about events in Oromia. Both are readily visible. The more difficult question is whether the work already being done can reinforce other Oromo efforts across organizations, countries, and issue areas. The Oromo Diplomatic Coordination Compact proposed here is meant to address that problem: not by creating one organization for everyone, but by creating a durable method for independent organizations to cooperate where their interests overlap.

The Oromo Diaspora Today: Capacity Without Continuity

The starting point, therefore, is not an absence of capacity. It is a substantial but dispersed body of organizations whose different strengths have not yet been connected consistently enough to produce cumulative diplomatic work.

The Oromo diaspora has an institutional base that is broader than many readers may realize. In advocacy and human rights, the Oromia Global Forum (OGF) links civic, professional, faith-based, and human-rights actors across several continents; the Oromo Legacy Leadership and Advocacy Association (OLLAA) documents abuses, publishes policy materials, and engages lawmakers and international human-rights bodies; and the United Kingdom-based Oromia Support Group (OSG) maintains a long-running archive of reports and international submissions. The Oromo Studies Association (OSA) supports scholarship and publishes the Journal of Oromo Studies, while the Siinqee Institute advances women-centered knowledge, gender justice, cultural memory, intergenerational learning, and public education.

Community and faith organizations provide another layer of capacity. The Oromo Community Organization (OCO) in the Washington, DC area offers social, health, employment, immigration, financial-literacy, English, and Afaan Oromo programs. In Ottawa, the Oromo Heritage Association of Canada (OHAC) provides Afaan Oromo classes, Oromo history sessions, cultural events, and newcomer support. The Oromo Community of Minnesota (OCM) assists immigrants and refugees and promotes cultural connection. The Oromian Community Association of Northern Alberta (OCANA) provides newcomer and refugee-resettlement services in Edmonton. The United Oromo Evangelical Churches (UOEC) links dozens of member churches and supports advocacy, pastoral training, youth and family programs, and humanitarian work. These examples are illustrative rather than exhaustive, but they show a diaspora with substantial organizational depth and varied expertise.

The present climate is therefore paradoxical: the Oromo diaspora has significant capacity, but that capacity is geographically dispersed, functionally specialized, and politically plural. Political difference is not itself the problem; a diaspora of this size should not be expected to agree on every question. Difficulty arises when disagreement, mistrust, competition over leadership or representation, or efforts by outside actors to influence diaspora politics prevent organizations from cooperating even where their interests overlap. The practical result is discontinuity: relationships, records, policy contacts, and follow-up can be difficult to sustain after immediate attention recedes. Separate organizations may undertake similar work without knowing what others have already done, while other necessary tasks receive less attention. The problem, then, is not inactivity but the difficulty of turning extensive activity into sustained, cumulative engagement.

Concerns about this pattern are not new. Sociologist Asafa Jalata has argued that Oromo self-help and civic organizations have multiplied without consistently developing into durable national institutions, in part because rivalry and outside interference have weakened emerging initiatives. At the same time, Oromo history contains examples of the opposite possibility. The Mecha-Tulema Self-Help Association linked education, socioeconomic development, empowerment, and cultural and political consciousness, demonstrating the potential strength of civic organization when immediate needs are connected to a larger public purpose.

Diaspora leaders have also attempted coordination before. Earlier efforts included the Oromo Leaders Convention, the Global Gumii Organization, a proposed Oromo Diplomatic Center, a humanitarian relief agency, the Declaration of Values of Oromo Governance, and the Oromo Charter of Freedom. These initiatives differed in purpose, but each recognized that separate work in politics, relief, advocacy, or diplomacy needed some form of connection. Legal scholar Tsegaye Ararssa later made the practical point that the diaspora could begin by coordinating the relief, diplomatic, advocacy, lobbying, and campaigning work it was already doing. The lesson is not that previous efforts lacked commitment. It is that coordination must be modest enough to survive leadership changes and political disagreement without requiring organizations to surrender their independence.

Why Coordination Matters

Diplomacy is cumulative work. Demonstrations can draw attention, public statements can register urgency, reports can establish facts, and meetings can open doors. But none of these creates sustained influence by itself. A meeting becomes more valuable when it is prepared with credible information, a clear request, and knowledge of the institution being addressed. It becomes more valuable still when someone records what happened, follows up, maintains the relationship, and connects that meeting to the next opportunity.

Coordination also allows specialization to become an advantage rather than a source of separation. A documentation organization may be best positioned to verify testimony. Lawyers may know how to frame a claim for a particular legal or policy forum. Scholars can supply historical and political context. Community organizations can identify affected families and mobilize constituencies. Faith organizations can reach networks that political groups may not reach. Journalists, artists, and cultural institutions can communicate to wider publics. No single organization needs to master all these functions if organizations know when and how to work with one another.

Coordination matters for another reason: recurring violations can be misunderstood when each is presented as a separate emergency. Writing about Oromo civil society, Kebene Wodajo argues that civil-society organizations must look beyond the immediate violation and confront the structures that allow similar harms to recur. Coordinated diplomacy can help connect individual cases to broader patterns, preserve evidence across time, and turn repeated emergencies into sustained demands for institutional change rather than a succession of isolated appeals.

None of this guarantees policy success. Host governments have their own strategic interests, international institutions have limited mandates, and public attention moves unevenly. Coordination cannot remove those constraints. What it can do is reduce avoidable weaknesses on the Oromo side: lost institutional memory, inconsistent follow-up, unnecessary duplication, preventable factual disputes, unclear responsibility, and the need to rebuild relationships from the beginning whenever a new crisis occurs.

Working Together Without Agreeing on Everything

If sustained diplomacy requires organizations to work across functional and institutional boundaries, the practical question is how they can cooperate when they do not agree on every political question. Oromo organizations differ over strategy, leadership, ideology, institutional priorities, and the constitutional future of Oromia. Those differences are real, and a durable compact should not pretend otherwise. Its purpose should be to identify the smaller but consequential field in which cooperation remains possible despite them.

What binds the Oromo is larger than any single organization. Afaan Oromo carries memory, knowledge, political argument, and belonging. Oromia carries meanings of land, livelihood, ancestry, and responsibility. Shared experiences of exclusion, displacement, resistance, and cultural survival have also produced common concerns about dignity, security, voice, and the ability of the Oromo people to participate meaningfully in shaping their future. These foundations do not erase religious, regional, generational, class, or political differences, and they do not deny the rights of others. They provide enough common ground for cooperation on carefully defined issues.

Working unity therefore requires a different standard from political unity. Organizations do not need agreement on a final political settlement before cooperating on civilian protection, due process, humanitarian access, language and cultural rights, land-related concerns, accountability, political participation, or other matters they jointly identify. The compact should separate shared minimum interests from contested political programs.

  • Agree on the work, not on every political conclusion. Joint action should be limited to priorities that participating organizations have expressly approved. Agreement on one campaign should not be interpreted as agreement on unrelated questions.

  • Preserve organizational autonomy. Each organization should retain its name, leadership, mission, finances, membership, and political positions. Participation in the compact should not transfer authority to a new center.

  • Make participation issue-specific and voluntary. Organizations should be able to join a common initiative when they support its objective and abstain when they do not, without treating abstention as disloyalty or allowing disagreement on one issue to destroy cooperation on another.

  • Use common rules when disagreement remains. Participants can still agree on factual verification, source protection, respectful public communication, transparent authorization of joint statements, and a prohibition on claiming to speak for organizations that have not consented.

This approach treats pluralism as a condition to be governed rather than a defect to be eliminated. It asks Oromo organizations to build trust through completed work. A successful joint briefing, documented referral, shared calendar, or coordinated campaign can create the confidence needed for the next project. Working unity can therefore grow from practice rather than waiting for a political consensus that may never come.

A Compact, Not a Merger

The Oromo Diplomatic Coordination Compact should be understood as a limited operating agreement among willing organizations. It would not be a political party, government-in-exile, umbrella body with authority over its members, or institution claiming to represent every Oromo. It would coordinate defined work and nothing more. Its legitimacy would come from the continuing consent of participating organizations, transparent rules, and faithful completion of agreed responsibilities.

That limited design is a strength. The compact does not need to settle the final political future of the Oromo people in order to maintain a contact list, prepare a joint briefing, coordinate a response to an international deadline, preserve records, or ensure that an official who met Oromo representatives last year receives a serious follow-up this year. It should be judged by whether it helps existing organizations do these practical things better together.

What the Compact Should Do

  • Agree on a limited annual agenda. Participating organizations should select three to five priorities on which broad cooperation is possible. Each priority should identify the issue, the institution or audience to be addressed, the action requested, the organizations responsible, and the expected follow-up.

  • Create a small coordination desk. The compact does not require another large umbrella organization. A modest professional office or rotating secretariat could maintain organizational contacts, track legislative and international deadlines, schedule joint meetings, preserve records, and remind participants of agreed responsibilities. Its authority should be administrative and coordinative, not political or monopolistic.

  • Match responsibilities to organizational strengths. Documentation groups can verify claims and preserve testimony; lawyers can advise on legal and policy forums; scholars can provide context and analysis; community and faith organizations can mobilize constituencies; and media, cultural, women’s, youth, and professional networks can reach audiences that conventional political organizations often miss.

  • Tell the Oromo story in a fuller voice. International engagement often begins with suffering, but a people should not be represented only through its injuries. Oromo diplomacy should also communicate language, culture, knowledge, creativity, democratic traditions, aspirations, and contributions to the wider world.

  • Protect credibility, people, and institutional memory. Participating organizations should adopt common minimum standards for factual verification, informed consent, confidential sources, correction of errors, and authorization of joint statements. They should also maintain secure records of meetings, commitments, reports, and institutional contacts.

  • Connect urgent cases to structural change. Joint advocacy should respond quickly to immediate harms while also explaining the laws, policies, institutions, and power arrangements that allow similar harms to recur. This helps turn repeated crises into sustained diplomatic demands rather than treating each event as a separate emergency.

  • Build dependable and transparent financing. Volunteer service will remain important, but sustained diplomatic work cannot depend entirely on personal sacrifice and emergency fundraising. A restricted coordination fund, clear contribution rules, independently reviewed accounts, and regular public reporting can support continuity without allowing funding to purchase control over representation.

Guarding Against Capture

Any coordinating mechanism can be captured by a faction, donor, personality, political party, or well-resourced organization. The compact must therefore protect itself against becoming the very kind of centralized authority it is designed to avoid. Leadership should rotate. Decisions and authorizations should be recorded. Conflicts of interest should be disclosed. Financial reports should be available to participating organizations. Women, youth, professionals, community organizations, and people directly affected by the issues under discussion should have meaningful opportunities to participate.

Coordination must also be self-critical. An institution created to challenge injustice should not reproduce exclusion, domination, or unaccountable leadership within its own structure. The coordination desk should speak only within the authority expressly granted to it. Joint statements should identify the organizations that approved them. No political party, donor, religious body, personality, or participating organization should be able to convert coordination into ownership.

What Success Would Look Like

Success should not be measured mainly by the number of statements issued, meetings announced, or demonstrations organized. A compact would be working when relationships survive leadership changes; when an official who met Oromo representatives receives consistent follow-up; when verified information can move efficiently from affected communities to researchers, lawyers, journalists, and policymakers; when joint work is completed on schedule; and when a new crisis can be addressed through an existing process instead of rebuilding the advocacy structure from the beginning.

The deeper measure is whether separate efforts begin to accumulate. Each report should strengthen the next briefing. Each meeting should improve the next contact. Each campaign should leave behind knowledge, relationships, and capacity that other participating organizations can use. Sustained diplomacy is created when today’s work makes tomorrow’s work easier, faster, and more credible.

A Practical First Step

The first step should be a narrowly focused meeting of willing Oromo organizations. It should not be another general political conference and should not attempt to resolve every disagreement. Its purpose should be practical: adopt a one-year common agenda, identify participating organizations, assign responsibilities, approve basic operating and ethical standards, establish a modest coordination mechanism, and set a date for reviewing performance.

The initial compact could operate as a one-year pilot. At the end of that period, participants should ask straightforward questions: What agreed work was completed? Which institutional relationships were maintained? Where did coordination fail? Were information and sources handled responsibly? Were funds managed transparently? Did the arrangement preserve the autonomy of participating organizations? The answers should determine whether the compact is renewed, revised, or discontinued.

Oromo organizations do not need perfect unity. They need working unity. They do not have to agree on everything before cooperating on anything. The Oromo diaspora already possesses organizations, professional talent, cultural resources, community networks, knowledge, and committed advocates. The immediate task is to connect those assets through disciplined cooperation while protecting legitimate differences. The movement from separate advocacy efforts to sustained Oromo diplomacy begins when common responsibility becomes regular practice.