The Drum Beat 363 - Manifesto: Communication and Media for Development

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THE COMMUNICATION AND MEDIA FOR DEVELOPMENT MANIFESTO

"An Ear to the Ground and a Cry from the Heart"
Effective Anti-Poverty Action through Increased Communication and Media for Development Action

From Warren Feek
Executive Director, The Communication Initiative -

Best wishes to everyone. This Drum Beat attempts, briefly, to make the overall argument for why there needs to be a much higher emphasis on and investment in communication and media for development initiatives in order to achieve improved local, national and international development on poverty and other core issues. The argument and evidence cited draw from all of the experiences, insights and ideas many of you have shared through The Communication Initiative process. I am calling this document the "Manifesto".

We all have heard, on a regular basis, our friends and colleagues in communication and media development initiatives (and maybe ourselves) observe that, as a community, we have not done a good job of making the case for our work. The Manifesto below is an attempt to help make that case. All too regularly we also hear people, ranging from local community citizens to professionals working in other development disciplines, say that they do not really understand: What is "Communication and Media for Development"? They express uncertainty about what contribution (added value) communication and media can and do make. This Manifesto is also an attempt to improve that understanding.

The Manifesto is deliberately short, data heavy, and designed in such a way that you can take this template and amend and adapt it to your particular circumstances and priorities.

I strongly encourage you to review this manifesto and then provide your responses and ideas. There are four ways to do this:

1. Complete the Pulse Poll: Do you agree or disagree? "The Communication and Media for Development Manifesto helps to make arguments that will strengthen my work."

2. Contribute to the Online Dialogue: Please engage in dialogue through the DrumBeatChat forum: click here to view the forum online (discussion will begin the week of Sept 4-8).

3. Complete a Brief Questionnaire: Please click here for the survey.

4. Complete a Page Review Form: After you have read this piece please review and comment on its value to your work by completing the simple rating and comment form online - click here.

Many thanks, Warren Feek Executive Director, The Communication Initiative wfeek@comminit.com

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"An Ear to the Ground and a Cry from the Heart"
Effective Anti-Poverty Action through Increased Communication and Media for Development Action

The Communication and Media for Development Manifesto

DRAFT

This manifesto proposes a set of steps for local, national and international development decision makers and funders to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of the overall work of their organisations in addressing poverty and related issues. The proposals are based on an analysis of the significant challenges facing local, national, and international development and the extensive impact opportunities provided by communication and media for development action.


1. DEVELOPMENT CHALLENGES
An Analysis of the Requirements for More Effective Development Action

The struggle against poverty, including the race to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and to implement effective poverty reduction strategy (PRS) programmes, requires mobilising and harnessing all possible global capacities and resources.

In particular, there is a pressing and compelling need for capacities and strategies that can best address the vital human and social dimensions of poverty, governance, health, education, conflict, HIV/AIDS, children, and other priority development issues at the scale required.

All development issues, including the central issue of poverty itself, have questions of social norms, cultural dynamics, policy considerations, individual behaviours and atttitudes, historical factors, knowledge, information, and creativity as both central elements of those development problems and strategic opportunities for effective action.

International development, if it is to be more effective and efficient relative to the MDGs and PRS programmes, needs to have a much closer collective "ear to the ground". It is the situations and experiences of people and communities directly experiencing poverty and related issues that will ensure relevant and effective strategies and initiatives.

Local, national and international decision makers can also improve the effectiveness and efficiency of their work by increasing the extent to which they listen to the "cries from the heart" of people in their communities. Those cries will include valuable ideas and suggestions for effective programmes.

This is not just a matter of improved and more effective use of limited resources. It is also a fundamental human right that people drive and decide the changes in their lives, families, and communities. It is their lives in which we have the honour of engaging.

Communication and Media for Development is an extensive and dynamic community of practitioners and organisations that seek to advance this desperately needed approach to development. The context and analysis above drive the nature of our work. The qualities, scope, and demonstrated impact of communication and media for development are what keep us advocating for increased support and growth.


2. COMMUNICATION AND MEDIA FOR DEVELOPMENT
Strategic and Programmatic Action for Effective International Development Action

Considering the arguments and analysis above, the following local, national, and international development qualities and strategies, which are the core elements of communication and media for development, are required in greater depth and scale:

VOICE: Increased space for and attention to the voice, perspective, and central contribution of those most affected by poverty and other development issues.

KNOWLEDGE: Widened and expanded knowledge and information sharing including, for improved relevance and other reasons, a higher priority on knowledge and information generated within the communities and countries that are bearing the heaviest burden of poverty and related issues.

CULTURE: Improved ways to engage the rich cultural diversity across the globe and the important and diverse ways in which those varied cultures understand, address, and harness the vitally important factors of leadership, community, behaviour, and inclusion in order to improve their families, communities and countries.

DEBATE: Significantly expanded public and private debate and dialogue on the issues that are of priority importance in each international, national, and local context.

POLICY: More open, participative, and inclusive processes of policy development that increase the substantive integration of the views and perspectives of those most affected by poverty and other development issues.

LEGISLATION: More effective legislation, including on media, supporting a pluralistic communication environment with space for a full range of organisations and voices.

BEHAVIOUR and ATTITUDES: Expanded focus on addressing the relevant behaviours of both people affected and decision makers in order to accelerate action on the development issues of concern.

DATA: Improved collection, sharing, and utilising of data related to the human and social dimensions of development.


3. DEMONSTRATED CHANGE
The Demonstrated Effectiveness of Communication and Media for Development Action

3.1 Historical Change

There are compelling and credible historical processes that had effective communication and media strategies as essential parts of their overall strategy. The Civil Rights, anti-Apartheid, anti-Tobacco, Representative Democracy, Child Rights and Women’s Movements, as well as other past and ongoing global, regional, national and local social movements, have all included communication strategies as a main (often the central) part of their change effort. In many cases, all that these movements used were communication and media strategies. There is no vaccine, for example, for civil rights.

3.2 Research Data

There is an increasing body of research and evaluation knowledge on the direct impact of communication and media for development action on poverty and its related and contributing factors - data that includes, relative to major development priorities:

Poverty:

• Local Language Media - India: States with higher levels of media development are more active in protecting vulnerable citizens… A 1% increase in newspaper circulation is associated with a 2.4% increase in public food distribution and a 5.5% increase in calamity relief expenditures. [See: Timothy Besley, Robin Burgess. Political Economy of Government Responsiveness: Theory and Evidence from India, Quarterly Journal of Economics, November 2002 - click here.]
• Voices of Women - AWSO - Middle East: In a programme to support Arab women's achievement of economic security, nearly 69% of participants contrasted with only 40% of non-participants, reported that they knew where to obtain information about business or personal loans. Participants were also significantly more likely than were non-participants to find out about training that could benefit them professionally (94% versus 68%). [See: "AWSO Program Helps Arab Women Redirect Their Lives", Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health Center for Communication Programs, Communication Impact! Number 13, December 2001 - click here.]

Governance:

• Democratising Knowledge - Uganda: Increased public access to information…reduce[s]…corruption of public funds... [Corrupt] capture of public funds was reduced from 80 percent in 1995 to less than 20 percent in 2001. [See: Ritva Reinikka and Jakob Svensson. Power of Information: Evidence From a Newspaper Campaign to Reduce Capture, World Bank Institute, December 2003 - click here.]
• Information Flows - Global: Empirical analysis shows that countries which have better information flows as measured by both freedom of information and transparency have better quality governance. [See: Roumeen Islam. Do More Transparent Governments Govern Better? World Bank Policy Research Working Paper No. 3077, World Bank, June 2003 - click here.]
• New Technologies - Gyandoot - India: Citizens in the community perceive a shift in corruption levels, especially in terms of access to information and lesser harassment by the government officials. [An Evaluation of Gyandoot, Center for Electronic Governance, Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, India, 2003.]

Gender:

• Public Debate and Declaration - Tostan - Burkina Faso: 23 communities made a public declaration for the abandonment of the practice of female genital cutting (FGC) in front of 5,000 villagers, religious, traditional and political leaders, the media and programme managers from government, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and international organisations. [See: Dr. Nafissatou J. Diop, Edmond Badge, Djingri Ouoba & Molly Melching. Replication of the Tostan Programme in Burkina Faso: How 23 Villages Participated in a Human Rights-based Education Programme and Abandoned the Practice of Female Genital Cutting in Burkina Faso, Population Council, Mwangaza Action, Tostan, U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) & GTZ Supra Regional FGC Project, April 2003 - click here.]
• Inter-personal Discussion - MAP - South Africa: 71% of the male participants believed that women should have the same rights as men, whereas only 25% of men in the control group felt this way. 82% of the participants thought that it was not normal for men to sometimes beat their wives, whereas only 38% of the control group felt that way. [See: Andrew Levack, Manisha Mehta, and Dean Peacock. The Men As Partners Program in South Africa: Reaching Men to End Genderbased Violence and Promote Sexual and Reproductive Health - click here.]

Children:

• Campaign - The Philippines: The proportion of fully vaccinated children of ages 12-23 months increased from 54% to 65%. The average number of vaccinations that a child under 2 years received increased from 4.32 to 5.10. Coverage increased between 1989 and 1990 by 0.77. The amount of this increase that was attributed to the media and communication was 0.54. [See: "Improving vaccination coverage in urban areas through a health communication campaign: the 1990 Philippine experience" WHO Bulletin DMS. Vol. 72, 1994 - click here.]
• Promotion - Mexico: Conclusion - mass media promotion and popular communication campaigns are an effective strategy for informing and motivating mothers to seek immunisation services for their children. Overall, 83% were aware of the campaign and 63% were impacted by its messages. The net increase in immunisation between the "aware" and "unaware" groups was 14.8%, though it must be recognised that a relatively large proportion of the "unaware" mothers also took their children for vaccinations, a feature the authors attribute to long-term momentum gained by successive vaccination campaigns. [See: Ricardo Perez-Cuevas, Hortensia Reyes, Ulises Pego, Patricia Tome, Karla Ceja, Sergio Flores, Gonzalez Gutierrez."Immunization promotion activities: are they effective in encouraging mothers to immunize their children?", Social Science and Medicine 49, 1999 - click here.]

Maternal Mortality:

• Participation - Suami/Suagi - Indonesia: When husbands were exposed to multi-media campaign messages about maternal mortality prevention and birth preparedness, men's knowledge increased and men's action toward becoming an alert husband increased; furthermore, the odds of knowledge acquisition and taking action were even higher for men who engaged in interpersonal communication about the campaign messages. [See: C. L. Shefner-Rogers and S. Sood. Involving husbands in Safe Motherhood: Effects of the SUAMI SIAGA campaign in Indonesia. Journal of Health Communication, 9, 2004 - click here.]
• Education-Entertainment - Smiling Sun - Bangladesh: Twice as many respondents (14%) who had watched the drama had received services than those who had not seen (7%) the drama. 9% of viewers had actually visited a clinic after being inspired by the drama. 70% of viewers had received antenatal care (ANC) services during their last pregnancy, as compared to 48% of non-viewers. 58% of non-viewers, versus 41% of viewers, said they had taken "no preparations" in advance of their last pregnancy. [See: Evaluation of Smiling Sun Campaign, Bangladesh Center for Communication Programs (BCCP), March 2003 - click here.]

Health and HIV/AIDS:

• Mass Media Trends and Access - Africa: There is a persistent and frequently strong association between exposure to the mass media and reproductive behaviour in Africa in the expected direction; greater knowledge and use of contraception, intention to use contraception in the future, preferences for fewer children and intention to stop child bearing. In Zambia, 15% of married women with no education regularly exposed to radio and TV are currently using contraception compared with 9% exposed to one of those media and 7% exposed to no media. [See: Charles Westoff and Akinrola Bankole. Mass Media and Reproductive Behavior in Africa, Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) Analytical Reports, April 1997 - click here.]
• Integrated Multi-Communication - Soul City - South Africa: Exposure to Soul City multi-media over 6 series is significantly associated with reports of consistent condom use in relation to a regular sexual partner in the preceding 12 months (p=0.009). Compared to respondents with no exposure, respondents with exposure to Soul City multi-media over 6 series were 4 times as likely to report always using a condom with a regular sexual partner - with a consistent dose response. (See table 8: OR low exposure = 2.6; OR medium exposure = 3.8; OR high exposure = 4.) Conversely, exposure to Soul City multi-media over 6 series is associated with reducing the likelihood of reporting "never" using a condom with a regular sexual partner in the preceding 12 months (p=0.000). Exposure to Soul City multi-media is also associated with consistent condom use with a partner other than one's regular partner - however, this result is not statistically significant (N=140, p=0.083). [See: Sue Goldstein and Esca Scheepers. "Using Edutainment for Social Change - Evidence from Soul City Over 6 Series" - paper accepted for World Congress on Communication for Development, October 2006 - Not yet available. Please contact Sue Goldstein suegold@soulcity.org.za]

Environment:

• Drama - Arcandina - Ecuador: Knowledge that water consumption is dependent on population needs and that this is a key problem to maintaining a healthy environment increased from 50% to 75%; knowledge that erosion is due to uncontrolled forestry by human populations increased from 39.1% to 74.5%; and knowledge that the destruction of the environment is due to human behaviours increased from 33% to 75%. [See: Arcandina - Impact Data, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health Center for Communication Programs - click here.]
• Engagement of Local Views and Contributions - Gwira Banso - Ghana: 50% of all farms planted trees supporting local reforestation. [See: Mark Appiah. Co-partnership in Forest Management: The Gwira-Banso Joint Forest Management Project in Ghana, Department of Forest Ecology, Tropical Sirviculture Unit, University of Helsinki, Finland, 2001 - click here.]

There are many other examples and a range of additional data.

4. PROPOSED ACTIONS FOR LOCAL, NATIONAL, AND INTERNATIONAL POLICY MAKERS AND FUNDERS

As a community of over 100,000 people in over 5,000 different organisations across all countries and regions of the globe seeking improved international development action, we ask local, national, and international participants and decision makers across the spectrum - from children, mayors and national government officials to global technical experts, funders, and senior United Nations, bilateral, and foundation staff - to take the following actions. These actions provide the building blocks for growing and strengthening the important strategic and programming steps highlighted above. They derive from the proof of principle - both social movements and research/evaluation data - also cited above. The key steps that we request are:

4.1 An expanded and more direct involvement within your decision making, policy making and funding processes of people and organisations whose experience is rooted, on a daily basis, in the development issues that are the priority for your organisation.

4.2 An increased emphasis, as part of your organisation's strategy in local, national, and international contexts, on promoting debate and dialogue on priority issues - thus balancing the present tendency to promote particular answers, positions or organisational brands.

4.3 A higher priority in your data collection and analysis on communication and media knowledge and impact related to local, national, and international development action.

4.4 The employment of more staff across your organisation with skills, interests, and experience in communication and media for development.

4.5 A budget line for communication and media within all of your programmes and projects with formal guidance to programme managers to expend between 5 and 10% of budgets on communication and media action directly related to the priority development issues they are addressing.

4.6 An increase in funding support by your organisation for specific communication and media development strategies, programmes and other initiatives.

These proposals are justified by the history, scope, and demonstrated impact of communication and media for development. They are presented in the context of recent funding trends towards a strong emphasis on aid effectiveness, budgetary support and decentralised decision making to country office locations.

Through the analysis and actions highlighted above the overall effectiveness and impact of the work of your organisations will be strengthened. Together - locally, nationally, and globally - we will all make more substantive progress to address poverty and other priority local, national, and international development issues.

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CONTRIBUTE
Please contribute your opinions on this Manifesto. There are four ways to do this:

1. Complete the Pulse Poll: Do you agree or disagree? "The Communication and Media for Development Manifesto helps to make arguments that will strengthen my work."

2. Contribute to the Online Dialogue: Please engage in dialogue through the DrumBeatChat forum: click here to view the forum online (discussion will begin the week of Sept 4-8).

3. Complete a Brief Questionnaire: Please click here for the survey.

4. Complete a Page Review Form: After you have read this piece please review and comment on its value to your work by completing the simple rating and comment form online - click here.

Thank you.

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This issue of The Drum Beat is meant to inspire dialogue and conversation among the Drum Beat network. 

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RESULTS of recent poll:

Overall the world communicates better now than it did 20 years ago.

57.14% Agree
38.57% Disagree
4.29% Unsure
Total number of participants = 70

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This issue of The Drum Beat is an opinion piece and has been written and signed by the individual writer. The views expressed herein are the perspective of the writer and are not necessarily reflective of the views or opinions of The Communication Initiative or any of The Communication Initiative Partners.

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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.

Please send material for The Drum Beat to the Editor - Deborah Heimann dheimann@comminit.com 

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