The Drum Beat 419 - Communication and Change News and Issues
From The Communication Initiative Network - where communication and media are central to social and economic development.
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This issue of The Drum Beat features a small selection of summaries of resources from one of our knowledge sections - Materials - which illustrate how communication and media are being used for effective development action around the world. These resources are primarily from 2007, with inclusion of a few older publications that are still available through various publishers.
If you would like your organisation's communication work or research and resource documents to be featured on The CI websites and in The Drum Beat newsletters, please contact Deborah Heimann [email protected]
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1. World Congress on Communication for Development: Lessons, Challenges and the Way Forward The first World Congress on Communication for Development (WCCD), held in October 2006 in Rome, Italy, was an opportunity for dialogue among 3 key stakeholders: policy makers, practitioners, and academics. Its purpose was to highlight the need to incorporate communication for development into development policies and practices. This publication includes proceedings from the various sessions of the Congress. It emphasises the value of using communication for development to engage stakeholders in a professional and systematic manner for more effective and sustainable project design and implementation. The WCCD was organised by the World Bank, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations, and The Communication Initiative (The CI).
2. Bringing Women Into Governance This handbook focuses on efforts to bring women into governance, illustrating ways that organisations and activists around the world can foster greater gender equity in civic engagement, advocacy, voting, and governance efforts to improve the quality of life for everyone. Five chapters highlight key approaches to supporting women leaders in making governments worldwide more responsive to the needs of women; these chapters focus on: strengthening women's leadership, building advocates and coalitions, mobilising women to vote and run for office, holding public officials accountable, and advancing peace and security.
3. Advancing Health Literacy: A Framework for Understanding and Action by Christina Zarcadoolas, Andrew Pleasant, and David S. Greer This book outlines the theory and practice of health literacy from a public health perspective. Its chapters focus on the history of health literacy, theoretical foundations of health and language literacy, and the role of the media; a series of case studies on topics such as prenatal care, anthrax, HIV/AIDS, genomics, and diabetes is also included. The book concludes with a series of guidelines for the development and assessment of health communication materials.
4. Participatory Communication: Working for Change by Shirley A. White, K. Sadanandan Nair, and Joseph Ascroft (Eds.) This volume explores the strengths, weaknesses, and complex nature of participation in diverse settings through a collection of 20 essays that focus on the concept of participation in development and raise questions relating to power, control, empowerment, awareness-raising, and self-reliance. The volume is divided into sections on theories, methodologies, participatory decision-making and action, and participatory message making. Case studies are included.
5. Culture, HIV and AIDS: An Annotated Bibliography by Vinh-Kim Nguyen, Jennifer Klot, Alton Phillips, and Catherine Pirkle Intended for those working to design culturally appropriate programmes for HIV/AIDS education, this bibliography includes a list of documents with full publication information in addition to a 1-paragraph synopsis. The resource is divided into 4 sections. The first ("Part 1: Culture and everyday life: micro and macro approaches") includes literature that examines how culture shapes the pandemic and its impacts. The second ("Part 2: The response to the epidemic: culture of prevention and care") includes references that focus on the response to the epidemic, and situate this response in the broader socio-cultural context. The third and fourth sections include selected literature in Spanish and French, respectively.
6. Digital and Privacy Security for Human Rights Defenders by Dmitri Vitaliev This manual explores practical and technical issues of computer use in the context of defending human rights. According to the author, aspects of information and communication technology (ICT) have improved the security of human rights defenders (HRDs), facilitated communication and information exchange with partners, and increased effectiveness of their mission. However, ICT has ushered in previously unknown vulnerabilities. Dmitri Vitaliev takes the position that there is a need to operate in a climate where information is not stolen, damaged, compromised, or restricted in order to ensure equal opportunity for information dissemination and access. To that end, he provides information and tools designed to help individuals and organisations create and implement security policies. [All tools referred to in the manual (and descriptions of these tools) are available for download in 6 languages (Arabic, English, Farsi, French, Russian, and Spanish).] The manual concludes by proposing 17 points for the Internet Rights Charter.
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Look for resources related to your specific areas of interest on The CI Theme Sites:
Avian Influenza Materials
Democracy and Governance Materials
Early Child Development Materials
HIV/AIDS Materials
ICT for Development Materials
Natural Resource Management Materials
Polio Materials
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7. Coping with Climate Change According to this edition of Information and Communication Technology (ICT)'s 'Update', because of predictions that developing countries will suffer far more from the impacts of global warming than Europe and North America, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and researchers are engaged in practical strategies of mitigating and adapting in local communities. This edition looks at a few of such pioneering activities in African, Caribbean, and Pacific (ACP) countries. As detailed in the central article, researchers in American Samoa employ geographic information system (GIS), satellite imagery, and tide gauges to track the landward retreat of mangrove forests in response to rising sea levels. An editorial by Ochiengo Ogodo asserts that in Africa few journalists or editors grasp the implications of climate change; yet, farmers in communities and civil society organisations across the ACP need to have climate change information in order to have more voice. Thus, he observes, there is a vital role for the media, which need the cooperation of editors, scientists, and professional journalism networks to bring these issues to the attention of civil society.
8. Development Journal by Wendy Harcourt (Ed.) This quarterly journal of the Society for International Development explores issues of human-centred development, including alternative perspectives on civil society, development policy, and community-based strategies. The journal's contents focus on policies, practices, and institutions working for economic and social justice, human progress, environmental rights, gender equity, equality, and freedom.
9. Maternal Survival Toolkit: Behavior Change Interventions to Improve Maternal Health Field-tested in Kenya, Guinea, and Bangladesh, the maternal survival framework outlined in this kit organises behaviour change interventions into 3 areas: seeking skilled care, birth preparedness, and providing skilled care. These are interventions at the household, community, and health facility levels that begin with information gathering on attitudes and beliefs about skilled care. The resource includes lessons learned and global programme experience from a project called the Safe Motherhood Initiative, and provides formative research instruments for the design and implementation of effective maternal survival interventions.
10. Taste for Life: A New Resource on the Relationship Between HIV and Nutrition by André Croucamp and Neil Napper The purpose of Taste for Life is to explore practical and accessible strategies for nutrition as a co-therapy for those on anti-retroviral therapy (ART), as well as to offer a therapy alternative for those not eligible for ART. It uses fictional characters in a lifestyle magazine format that "normalises positive living" and communicates the idea that "adapting your lifestyle to deal with HIV is like adapting to and living with any other chronic disease." The publication's development team introduces very detailed profiles of characters in a support group in order to represent specific educational messages.
11. MENTOR: Monitoring and Evaluation Network of Training On-line Resources This web-based compilation of free training materials and tools on health-related monitoring and evaluation (M&E) topics is designed for use by researchers, programme managers, trainers, policy makers, students, and other public health professionals. It includes an interactive mini-course on M&E fundamentals, downloadable training materials, and population research materials.
12. People's Law: Ideas for Resource Rights Campaigners Power Tool Series by Kyeretwie Opoku and Elijah Yaw Danso This tool, based on experience in the forestry sector in Ghana, aims to support resource rights campaigners working in community mobilisation to better manage media and legal strategies. It features ideas about what legal systems are and are not, and how they actually work. It also explores ways of using communication to empower campaigners, and contains guides on how to integrate legal strategies into resource rights campaigns without giving away control of the process to legal professionals whom campaigners employ.
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13. Handbook on Access to HIV/AIDS-Related Treatment: A Collection of Information, Tools and Resources for NGOs, CBOs and PLWHA Groups by Carolyn Green, Dr. Mandeep Dhaliwal, Sarah Lee, Dr. Vinh Kim Nguyen, Hillary Curtis, and Georgina Stock This handbook is intended to assist groups in finding ways of understanding, planning, and undertaking work on HIV/AIDS-related treatment. Designed for use with people of varying levels of experience, it aims to build practical skills through participatory activities and experience-sharing among NGOs, community-based organisations (CBOs), and people living with HIV/AIDS (PLWHA) groups.
14. Designing Messages for Development Communication: An Audience Participation-Based Approach by Bella Mody This book outlines an audience research-based methodology to bridge the cultural and informational distance between senders and receivers. Intended for development and communication planners, as well as media workers, the volume proposes first listening to the audience so as to determine which information the audience needs and in what form they can process it most effectively and, then, pre-testing messages before they are produced in their final form.
15. Community Health Centers: A Movement and the People Who Made It Happen by Bonnie Lefkowitz This book tells the story of an approach to medicine in the United States that focuses on the wellness of whole neighbourhoods. As the author explains, since their creation during the 1960s, community health centres have served the needs of the economically poor in diverse communities, such as the tenements of New York, the colonias of Texas, the working class neighbourhoods of Boston, and the disenfranchised areas of the rural South. Through a series of personal accounts and interviews with national leaders and health care workers, patients, and activists in 5 communities, Lefkowitz shows how health centres have endured despite difficulties such as political change and discrimination.
16. Intellectual Property Management in Health and Agricultural Innovation: A Handbook of Best Practices by Anatole Krattiger (Ed.) Designed for policymakers, leaders of public sector, research establishments, technology transfer professionals, licensing executives, and scientists, this guide offers information and strategies for using the power of both intellectual property and the public domain. Among the topics explored: Ten "Things" a University Head Should Know about Setting Up a Technology Transfer Office; Defensive Publishing and the Public Domain; Using Milestones in Healthcare Product Licensing Deals to Assure Access in Developing Countries; Intellectual Property Freedom to Operate: The Law Firm's Approach and Role; and A Model for the Collaborative Development of Agricultural Biotechnology Products in Chile.
17. Contentious Citizens: Civil Society's Role in Campaigning for Social Change by Paul Hilder with Julie Caulier-Grice and Kate Lalor According to this document, "Social campaigning (as distinct from campaigns used in warfare, politics or business)...plays a vital role in publicly identifying social problems, proposing ways of tackling them, staging competing claims for the good society, and encouraging association, volunteering and active citizenship." The report provides a detailed analysis and historical overview of the social change campaigning landscape, with particular reference to campaigning in a network age. It explores how campaigning can be better supported and makes a series of recommendations intended to support campaigning organisations in raising awareness and responding to pressing and unmet needs.
18. Ethics and Language by Savyasaachi Jain (Ed.) This chapter highlights 10 principles on media coverage of HIV/AIDS that emerged from the discussions of those who attended workshops organised by The [European Union] EU-India Media Initiative on HIV/AIDS in 2005 and 2006. Approximately 112 journalists and media specialists contributed to the formation of these principles, which have the following objectives: increasing sensitive, high-quality media coverage of HIV/AIDS; acquainting journalists with PLWHA; focusing attention on policy, good governance, diversity, and gender equity; and introducing the media to expert opinion and technical and epidemiological inputs. Following the section detailing the 10 principles, the chapter explores the topic of nuances of language and offers terminology checklists for media use.
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