The Drum Beat 169: Interviews - Communication for Development

***

The VIII International Communication for Development Roundtable brought together a number of specialists, practitioners, advocates and funders of communication for development and social change projects. Both The Communication Initiative and La Iniciativa de Comunicacion were fortunate to be able to interview a few of the participants of this conference. Below are excerpts from these interviews.

1. Interview with Bunmi Makinwa - Currently Team Leader for the Intercountry Team for Eastern and Southern Africa, UNAIDS - Bunmi was a major contributor to the UNAIDS Communication Framework.

"...We have to go back to a learning mode. And this is very difficult as so-called 'experts' and specialists to now have to go and listen to what people are saying. All of these so-called 'wiz-kids' who talk so much about 'lack of capacity'...I think these are the wrong words. The capacity is there... Any community that exists today wherever in the world...has been resilient, has been able to overcome adverse conditions, has been able to overcome diseases...otherwise, they would have failed. How did they do it? This is where we have to begin. We have to learn from them. We have to work with them to develop their own programmes and to execute them. This is a long-term undertaking. We have been doing the short-term - come with programmes, come with tools, tell people what they have to do, give those tools to them...give those tools to them, and if they will do it, then come back and we monitor and do an evaluation. And of course, most of the time, the evaluation reflects positively, because we need more money. Independence of the evaluation must be guaranteed..."

***

HIV/AIDS

***

2. Interview with Alfonso Gumucio Dagron - A development communication specialist and the author of Making Waves, Alfonso Gumucio has a broad experience in participatory communication, social mobilisation, strategy design, as well as in design and production of audiovisual and printed communication materials.

"...I think that the evaluations that have been done up till now in the field of communication, those that have been done by big development institutions, are evaluations which have been totally controlled and biased. I think that there is a global industry of evaluators who are never going to enter into conflict with the institutions that employ them, and that therefore they give biased evaluations. I also think that evaluation is being used too much as a marketing tool. All of these things weigh against the quality of the evaluation. I also have criticisms of the methodologies. For example, I am bothered by the fact that the evaluation instruments are designed in different locations, not where the evaluations are done, and by the fact that the people applying these instruments are generally not familiar with the social, political and cultural context of the place. I even have criticisms of the way focus groups are selected, in terms of who are the people speaking, who is chosen to represent the community, etc. But apart from all this, I think that the processes of social development, or of communication for development, cannot be measured in the same way as an agricultural production process. The best example comes from the field of education. In education, you can't just say that you have educated or made literate 50,000 students. This is a statistic, but one statistic only. What degree of literacy are we talking about? What are the competencies that have been achieved? I recognise that specific instruments to measure the processes of development communication do not yet exist; we need to find them...."

Click here for the interview in Spanish.

3. Interview with UNFPA Communication Programme Specialists - The Team included: Sylvie I. Cohen, Acting Chief of the former Advocacy & IEC Branch of Technical Support Division; Delia Barcelona, Senior Technical Officer of the same Branch at UNFPA Headquarters; Mario Acha, Senior Communication Advisor of the Country Support Team (CST) in Mexico; Javed Ahmad, Senior Communication Advisor of the CST in Bratislava; Susan Aradeon, Former Senior Communication Advisor of the CST in Fiji; Makane Kane, Senior Communication Advisor of the CST in Dakar; Mallica Ratne, Former Senior Communication Advisor of the CST in Kathmandu; Annick Wouters, Senior Communication Advisor of the CST in Harare; and Rifai Ziad, Senior Communication Advisor of the CST in Amman.

"...Among the relatively wide range of the people we deal with at the field level and among national counterparts there is still a naive understanding of what communication is and what role it can and should play. They do not understand the evidence that few programmes will take off and achieve results without a communication component. People are still looking for the 'hardware', something that they can touch. They view communication as a second priority and we need to constantly demonstrate the strategic importance of having a sound social communication component. In a way we do more than provide technical support, we are engaging in an educational role to place communication where it belongs as a complex strategic scientific approach, not as some simple ad hoc product of a project. Sometimes this causes an obstacle to the work in the field with some national counterparts...."

***

NEW Pulse Poll

The equal participation of women in the development of their societies is a basic human right that supercedes cultural and religious differences.

Do you agree or disagree? Are you unsure?

RESULTS from our last poll as of Oct 25 2002:

Community radio is an effective way to address poverty.

89.71% Agree
5.88% Disagree
4.41% Unsure
Total number of participants = 68

***

4. Interview with Guy Bessette - A Team Member of the International Development Research Centre's (IDRC's) People, Land and Water programme, Guy holds a Ph.D. in educational technology. His research activities and his work at IDRC have been mainly action-research and capacity building in the field of development communication in the Sub-Saharan Region.

"... In IDRC we work in a structure which is made up of different problematics. One of these is managing natural resources in Africa which is called People, Land and Water. This initiative supports research in natural resource management. It has 3 objectives and one deals specifically with communication. I'm convinced that communication is so important and so neglected that we must put it at the forefront of the objectives of the programme. I see very few cases where this happens. Communication, when it's there, is usually one set of activities but it doesn't go to the higher level of objective. I think we must put it at the higher level because if you are dealing with community work, communication is the only tool for facilitating participation, that's it. At IDRC we recognise that and put it as one of the objectives so that research teams that want to know if they can participate in an initiative can see if their research deals with all of the objectives...."

5. Interview with Louie Tabing - Louie is the founder of the Tambuli Radio Project, and the subsequent Tambuli Foundation - created to sustain the growth of community radio in the Philippines.

"...The sustainability of the [Tambuli Radio] project is a serious matter and some did not believe that it was sustainable. They were telling us that this "volunteerism" has its limits, for instance. And - "Well, you say that they are volunteering now...after one year, after two, they will go." And true enough, there are people who go after two years. And some people are even asking for pay. But the reality is that no community where we put up a radio station since the early 90's is willing to give up their radio station. They are working there for as long as the transmitter is operating - for as long as there is a radio station. So - I have proven them wrong with respect to volunteerism. Being in radio carries something like maybe a sense of power, a sense of fulfillment, a sense that you are popular in the community, you are important to the community. You are serving. Every day there is a feeling among the individual volunteers that they are important to a larger group of people..."

6. Interview with Amy Bank and Ana Criquillion of Fundación Puntos de Encuentro (Nicaragua) and Sue Goldstein and Esca Scheepers of Soul City (South Africa) - Amy Bank (AB) is associate director of Puntos de Encuentro and co-creator of Sexto Sentido. Ana Criquillion (AC) is a veteran feminist activist and one of the founders of Puntos de Encuentro. At the end of Sept 2002, she retired from the position of Executive Director. Sue Goldstein (SG) is a medical doctor with a specialist degree in public health. She has been with Soul City since 1995. Esca Scheepers (ES) is a research methodologist specializing in the evaluation of mass media health and development communication. She is currently involved in the evaluation of the Soul City Regional Programme.

"AB: I remember, it must have been about 2 years ago, way before we were on the air, and when we were still struggling to write a first script and get some money, I saw a very small thing somewhere, a one paragraph blurb, that talked about a TV thing in South Africa,. I thought, oh my God, here's somebody doing the same thing we're trying to do but they're already doing it! At the time, I was so busy that I didn't even write. I remember saving the message so that I would have the email address. I kept seeing it every week and I had it on my list every week to write to Soul City to find out who they were and what was going on. It's like any of these social issues we deal with, just knowing somebody else is out there doing it was an inspiration. We realized we had been very isolated as an organisation in our own communications work. It was only after all of this that we found out that there were other experiences of social soaps, groups like Population Communications International who do their social soaps all around the world. But all of the PCI initiatives that I had heard about were all in coordination with Ministries of Health and UN-type organisations. There were huge contracts that came in from the government or from a UN organisation and then hired local professionals to do their work for them. When I say Soul City was really inspiring it's because I thought: "this looks like us" - an independent organisation that's doing its thing. That means that it can be done because we thought for a long time that we were really being way too ambitious or too audacious or too something and that the reason it was taking us so long to get it off the ground was because we were in fact nuts and that it really wasn't possible. We knew there was a difference between South Africa and Nicaragua but we said, Okay it can be done. And they're thinking about it in the same way, which means we can't be too far off..."

7. Interview with Jennifer Sibanda - Currently the Executive Director and the Regional Director for the Federation of African Media Women, Jennifer has been working with women journalists and rural communities for almost 20 years.

"...We realised that it would be very difficult to sustain the production of programmes because some women walk 10 kilometers to produce a radio programme. Imagine that. And we asked ourselves how many times can women do that, how long can one sustain that? We came up with the idea of starting income-generating projects that would strengthen the economic base for the project for instance, the project would be able to buy its own batteries, repair its own radios, and for women to have some extra income. Our hope was that women would be basically 'married' to this project - so that they themselves become the owners of the project. And by so doing, we are hoping that women will be rejuvenated will be committed, will be enthusiastic, that they will be eager to continue working on the project. And this is basically what?s happening..."

***

The Drum Beat seeks to cover the full range of communication for development activities. Inclusion of an item does not imply endorsement or support by The Partners.

Please send material for The Drum Beat to the Editor - Deborah Heimann dheimann@comminit.com
To reproduce any portion of The Drum Beat, click here for our policy.

To subscribe, click here.