Crossing the 'Dev-Code' Divide

Author Nalaka Gunawardene, January 31 2014: My former boss Robert Lamb, science writer and multi-award winning producer of environmental TV shows, once interviewed a bright young woman for a producer vacancy. She had come with impressive credentials and relevant experience.

Robert, whose forte was demystifying complex development issues, kept telling her how hard it was becoming to raise 'donor support' for his line of work.

He meant funding support from development donors - such as USAID [the United States Agency for International Development] and Britain's Department for International Development (DFID) - and various philanthropic foundations. But several minutes into the conversation, he realised that the job seeker was talking about an entirely different kind of donor - those donating organs for transplant.

"I learnt a basic communications lesson that day: never to assume your audience has the same frame of reference as I do," Robert recalled. "I'd spent many years demystifying development issues for public audiences, cutting through plenty of jargon and acronyms. But it was easy to slip into that lingo without even realising it!"

That lesson holds true for many who work in international development as researchers, practitioners or policy makers.

In their own circles, they use many specialist terms and abbreviations readily understood by peers. But the vast majority outside those networks have little understanding - or entirely different meanings for the same terms.

Take, for example, many references to Rio made by UN [United Nations] agencies and others concerned with sustainable development: Rio Declaration and Rio+20 among them. These stem from the original Earth Summit held in Rio de Janeiro in June 1992. Twenty years on, the city also hosted a follow-up event.

For those outside the charmed development circle, however, the second largest city of Brazil conjures images of colourful street carnivals, samba music and crowded beaches. Sports fans would immediately associate Rio with the 2014 FIFA [Fédération Internationale de Football Association] World Cup or the 2016 Summer Olympics.

Is it mass ignorance? Not really. Why should everyone be familiar with protracted debates or intricate mechanisms of the development sector - even if these help shape our common future?

To garner public support for their causes, the development community must connect with rest of society using everyday phrases, metaphors and images. That is a far better strategy than expecting everyone to understand their gobbledygook.

Sustainable development

The oft-bandied term sustainable development is a case in point. In 1987, the UN-appointed Brundtland Commission defined it as a pattern of economic growth that "meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs."

Conceptually elegant, for sure, but easier said than done in a world where many families cannot think beyond their next meal. And most governments chose not to see beyond the next election. Next generation thinking is rare.

Besides, what exactly does that ideal mean for, say, a subsistence farmer in Kenya or a small entrepreneur in Nepal? Does this long term view figure at all when developing country politicians and bureaucrats struggle to balance their national budgets or negotiate better terms of trade?

Working with Robert Lamb for 15 years, I saw how he brought seemingly dreary development issues alive on TV and video - dominant media of his time - through simple and sincere story telling. He mixed inter-governmental processes with stark ground level realities. In three decades he produced or commissioned hundreds of international TV documentaries exploring what sustainable development meant in the real world.

In 1992, Robert launched one of his most enduring documentary series called Children of Rio. The idea was simple yet brilliant: while politicians, diplomats and activists debated the fate of the planet, he focussed on 11 babies born that year in different parts of the world. If the Earth Summit was to mean anything to ordinary people, he asked, surely it should be reflected in the lives of these children and their families?

The children came from six developing countries (Brazil, China, Kenya, Papua New Guinea, South Africa and Venezuela), one economy in transition (Latvia) and three developed countries (Norway, United Kingdom and United States). Over the years, their personal stories - updated every other year - illustrated the uneven progress made since the original Rio summit. In most cases, the glass was less than half full.

One of 11 children came from Rio itself. Rosamaria was born in Rocinha, one of the most violent favelas, and grew up in a large extended family. A poor performer at school, she dropped out at 17 and gave birth to a baby boy soon afterwards. When Rio+20 happened in mid 2012, she was raising her son, Gustavo, with her boyfriend who isn't his father.

Just say MDG?

Tens of millions of Rosamarias and Gustavos - all over the world - face uncertain futures on our hot, crowded and increasingly wired planet. The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), adopted by governments in 2000, were meant to improve their living standards.

Described as "time-bound and measurable goals for socio-economic advancement", the eight MDGs come with 18 specific targets and 48 indicators. To be reached by 2015, they cover a broad spectrum from halving absolute poverty to combating HIV, and from getting all children to attend primary school to saving mothers from dying during pregnancy or childbirth.

MDGs were conceived by jargon-totting, data-wielding, acronym-loving development professionals. When governments endorsed them, these had to be 'marketed' to wider society - and that proved especially hard.

Saddled with an unwieldy and unattractive name, MDGs were handicapped from the start. They never captured popular imagination like other global campaigns of recent decades, such as the LiveAid concerts to help famine victims in Africa, or Jubilee 2000 to forgive national debt of the poorest countries.

At best, MDGs have been sloshing around in various UN 'ponds' without entering the ocean of popular culture. We are all losers for it.

As we near the 2015 deadline, MDG progress has been uneven across countries. Discussions are well underway on the next set of ideals for what the development community refers to as 'post-2015 period'.

There is plenty of unfinished business and much to choose from. Let's hope they pay more attention to better 'branding' this time around!

This is not choosing style over substance. But in this era of social media and information overload, catchy names, logos and slogans stand a much better chance of attracting eyeballs.

Beyond code

The world needs both hair-splitting technical experts who study problems in depth and detail, as well as capable communicators who take big issues and turn them into popular campaigns.

After working with technological 'geeks' and development workers for many years, I know they have at least one thing in common: their own peculiar languages that don't make much sense to the rest of us.

Talking in code is fine for peer-to-peer conversations. But it's a nonstarter for engaging policy makers and the public.

The IT [information technology] industry overcame that limit to their enormous profit. Using early day computers required programming and coding knowledge that only engineers or technicians had. Then, in the 1980s, innovators like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates vastly simplified the interface between humans and computers. That, and declining prices, brought it within reach of millions of non-specialists.

Oh, the geeks still talk among themselves in complex languages of their own. That's fine. But billions who use smart phones, tablets or other computing devices don't need to know a single word of code.

In contrast, the development community has yet to cross their own 'Dev Code Divide' that separates them from billions they want to engage.

The development community has had a handful of effective and passionate public communicators. One was the late James P. Grant, headed UNICEF [the United Nations Children's Fund] for 15 years. Nicholas D. Kristof, the influential New York Times columnist, once noted later that Grant "probably saved more lives than were destroyed by Hitler, Mao, and Stalin combined" through promotion of vaccinations and diarrhea treatments.

Grant championed his causes by carefully focusing on a few key, life-saving messages and amplifying them with simple and sincere words. He also used colourful metaphors.

'Inclusive development' is a new buzz word. A good start would be to discuss - in everyday language, please - what that really means.

Science journalist Nalaka Gunawardene has been working to demystify science and development topics for non-specialists for over 25 years. Click here to view his blogs.

Dedicated to Robert Paul Lamb (1952-2012) on his second death anniversary.

Image credit: One Planet Pictures