The Drum Beat 178 - Communication and Change News and Issues
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Happy New Year. Many best wishes to all for peace and positive progress in 2003.
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EXPERIENCES
1. arepp:Theatre for Life - South Africa - provides interactive social life-skills education to children, young people, and adults. The live puppetry performances focus on HIV/AIDS, sexuality, relationships, gender, discrimination, self-image, and all forms of abuse. Performances incorporate the current music, sayings, and social attitudes of the particular audience. They are followed by a facilitated discussion session with the cast. A supplementary information leaflet is provided for follow-up support. arepp:Theatre for Life also designs and runs various workshops which provide educators and entertainers with teaching aids for use in their peer education and outreach programmes.
Contact Brigid Schutz [email protected]
2. Educational Audiovisuals (AVE) - Bolivia - an NGO that works to support alternative and popular education for children and young people in Bolivia using audiovisual production, radio, posters, and video. Community participation is a priority, and AVE works to involve community children and teenagers as actors and artists. In its materials and training sessions, AVE uses fiction, humor, and didactic methods to focus on the specific problems, needs, aspirations, ways of thinking, and perspectives of those who participate in and benefit from these projects. AVE also offers workshops and training sessions to help increase the capacity of other NGOs to produce and use educational and communications materials.
Contact Julia Vargas [email protected] OR [email protected]
3. Linking African Women Entrepreneurs - Africa - an initiative to link African information and communication technology (ICT) entrepreneurs living in Africa with those living in the Diaspora. The goal of the programme is to help bridge the digital divide in Africa by providing women with access to ICTs to help improve their livelihoods. UNIFEM will provide training for African women's organisations and business associations.
Contact Micol Zarb [email protected]
4. Agricultural Technology Management Agency (ATMA), Shimla - India - a programme to foster the economic development of farmers in Dharamsala through technical aid and various incentives. Groups of farmers have been formed and these groups in turn execute small local projects. ATMA programme strategies include training sessions, demonstrations at farmers' fields, adaptive research trials on various aspects of production, exposure visits to farmers, and a media campaign.
Contact Project Director [email protected]
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Discussion Forum on HIV Communication Strategies
Will further explore issues raised in Panos' "Critical Challenges in HIV Communication" which can be viewed online - click here.
Discussion will begin January 6, 2003.
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5. Tortasperú - Peru - an e-business initiative run by a network of housewives. The programme is meant to serve the more than 2 million Peruvians who live outside Peru; they may order homemade cakes for relatives and friends back home to be baked by Peruvian housewives. Members of the network are trained in computer use, marketing, and e-commerce. Customers can order a cake from the electronic catalogue, which is accessible in Spanish or English. The order is sent by e-mail to a housewife who is a member of the network in the city where the cake is to be delivered. Tortasperú then sends a photograph to the customer via email of the person receiving the cake.
Contact Edwin San Roman [email protected]
6. The Three Pomegranate Network (3PN) - Armenia - links schools around the world in a collaborative network on the Internet. Activities are designed to teach skills such as online collaboration, language proficiency, critical thinking, web design, and research methods. The first 3PN involved 10 schools in 5 countries. In 1999, there were 30 participating schools in 8 countries. 3PN 2000 reached 15 countries and included 70 schools, 35 of them in Armenia.
Contact [email protected]
7. Independent Journalism Centre (IJC) - Nigeria - works for the independence of the media and extension of freedom of expression in Nigeria. Activities include training of working and prospective journalists, research in contemporary media issues, media documentation, and publishing and implementation of media projects that contribute to "the uplifting" of Nigerians who live in rural areas. The College of Journalism is the training arm; a Documentation Centre stocks books, journals, and visual and audio materials for use by local and international media, human rights activists, and media professionals; and, the Programmes Department implements media-related development projects across the country.
Contact [email protected]
8. Life Skills Global Learning Programme - Global - a distance learning programme to train and network youth in life skills. Young teacher/volunteers, including teenagers and young adults, work towards social change among youth in their own countries. The volunteers need to know how to read, speak, and write English as well as their local language. Each of the volunteers is trained and then recruits 5 more young people and passes on the same training to them. The recruiting process and training process then continues with the newly trained youth. Monthly meetings of trainees who are geographically close, and regional training workshops in peer counselling, are also part of the programme.
EVALUATIONS
9. Review of Kam Pussum Hed (KPH) Clinic: A Reproductive Health Facility of Wan Smolbag Theatre
KPH Centre is a reproductive health clinic that was designed to target young people in peri-urban communities in Vanuatu. It offers 2 major types of services: a clinic-based reproductive health facility and an awareness/educational programme. The overall aim of the Review was to assess the current operations, both the service and the outreach, of the KPH Clinic with a view towards improvement of reproductive health services provided by this health facility.
10. T-Shirts to Web Links: Women Connect! - Building Communications Capacity with Women's NGOs
A case study of Women Connect!, a 5-year effort designed to support the desire of women's NGOs in developing countries to communicate more effectively. Women Connect!, including its pilot project, was carried out collaboratively between 1997 and 2002. This paper presents highlights, results, lessons learned about women's NGOs and their use of communications, key findings from an external evaluation, and recommendations for future efforts to support women's NGOs.
11. Impact Data - Upper Region Water Supply Project (URWSP) - Ghana - this project installed 2,600 handpumps on boreholes, providing clean water for 1.2 million Ghanians. Repeated attempts to promote the use of communal waste dumps and latrines failed. According to researchers, more rigorous analysis of the cultural and gender-related factors that influence women's acceptance and understanding of these messages is needed. Specifically, they conclude that health education interventions often fail by targeting only women; behaviour will only change when men are educated on the use and misuse of water...
PLANNING MODELS
12. Implementing a Social Marketing Effort - an outline of 13 steps - from the Community Toolbox website.
13. The MARCH Approach to Key Features of Successful Behavioral Interventions
- Use of role models...
- Affective impact...
- Links to social and cultural narratives...
- Personalisation...
- Cognizance of impediments and facilitators...
14. Seven Steps to Create Value
- Value is...
- What does this mean?...
- How does this apply to my activities?...
- Constructing a Model of Total Value...
- Scale of Value for the Client...
- The Push to Create Value...
- Basic Action Plan for Creating Value...
TRENDS
15. Taking the Net to South Africa's Poor
from BBC News Science/Nature June 24 2002
"Internet cafes in South Africa are providing many with their first taste of the web and e-mail.... 2 months ago, Mkululi Bolo turned his back on more than a decade in journalism in order to set up an internet cafe in the South African township of Mdantsane where he was born and grew up. He did not decide on a career change for the money, but to try to bring the web to residents in disadvantaged areas.... As well as using the cafe to browse the internet and send e-mails, some use it to find a better job...."
16. Formulation and Implementation of Indigenous Radio Policy in Mexico
by Antoni Castells-Talens
Since 1979, the Mexican government has been building a radio network for indigenous audiences. Today, more than 20 stations broadcast in 31 languages. Through in-depth interviews and archival analysis, the formulation of the policy in Mexico City is compared with its implementation in one Maya station.
17. Communicating Culture: Community Media in Australia Examines the successes, stumbling blocks and failures of a communication system which has the potential to extend public sphere debates beyond the narrow confines of the mainstream media and their corporate overlords. It features approaches by some communities in using local radio to enhance the meaning of community; in others, broadcasting represents a powerful cultural resource which has the potential, at least, to contribute to public sphere activity.
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The Pulse Poll:
Do you agree or disagree? Development focused organisations should never pay for radio or television air time.
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MATERIALS
18. Knowledge and Attitudes of Older People about HIV/AIDS in Thailand: A Comparison with Young Adults
By Wassana Im-em, Mark VanLandingham, John Knodel, and Chanpen Saengtienchai Explores AIDS knowledge and attitudinal data collected during a 1999 sample of 773 older Thais from 4 provinces and Bangkok. The authors compare the results with data from a sample of 398 young adults using the same questionnaire, collected at the same sites, at the same time.
19. Maternal Mortality: Fact Sheets
from the Inter-Agency Group for Safe Motherhood (IAG)
Available in English & Spanish, the fact sheets provide concrete information on factors that contribute to women's death associated with pregnancy-related complications.
20. Voices from the Mountain: A Series of Oral Testimonies
from the Panos Institute
Each collection contains anecdotes, information, history, culture, knowledge, opinion, and experience - with all the contradictions this combination may imply. The series features individual voices of ordinary mountain dwelling people, in the context of the effort to meet national development needs without further marginalising these people.
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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.
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