This report is a summary of The Ninth United Nations Inter-Agency Roundtable on Communication for Development which took place in Rome, Italy, from 6–9 September 2004. The Roundtable is a biannual event bringing together United Nations agencies, bilateral and multilateral donors, foundations, development agencies, non-governmental organizations, scholars, and a number of practitioners in development communication throughout the world.
The last Roundtable, on HIV/AIDS communication and evaluation, marked a decisive recognition that success in achieving sustained behaviour change on a scale required to tackle the pandemic was fundamentally dependent on social change and that communication strategies needed to focus on both.
The Ninth Roundtable, attended by some 150 participants, focused on sustainable development, with three specific thematic areas: Communication for Natural Resource Management; Communication for Isolated and Marginalized Groups and Communication in Research, Extension and Education.
Communication for Development has existed for more than 30 years. Today, the importance of communication in development is generally acknowledged. It has moved from a focus on information dissemination to one on community participation. It is clear that the Millennium Development Goals cannot be achieved without good communication and there have been many national and international initiatives to acknowledge this. To this end, new strategies are needed and new tools must be developed.
There have been many global changes since the last Roundtable, and the event began by looking at the many challenges faced by the world today. These include the rapid spread of globalization and the spread of Information Communications Technologies (ICT), the increasing divide between rich and poor, the changing nature of the nation-state, the changing nature of the private sector, ecological pressure, the decentralization of services, the explosion of media – and the emergence of new social actors.
The Roundtable noted a number of principles shared and agreed on by all participants. These all start from the belief that communication for sustainable development is about people, who are the drivers of their own development. It must therefore contribute to sustainable change for the benefit of the isolated and the marginalized. Further, Communication for Development is a horizontal, two-way process that is about people coming together to identify problems, agree on visions for desirable futures, and empower the poorest. It is about the co-creation and sharing of knowledge. It respects the local context, values and culture. And finally, the approach of Participatory Communication for Development does not only apply to work with communities. It is an approach of equal importance to all stakeholders.
There was a general acknowledgement that the rapid expansion of ICTs has failed to bridge the gap between knowledge and information and that the poorest still have very limited participation in the development process. Throughout the past decade, a gradual shift can be observed away from technological and towards more socio-economic and cultural definitions of the Information Society. The term `knowledge societies' better coins this shift in emphasis from ICTs as `drivers' of change to a perspective where these technologies are regarded as tools. These may provide a new potential for combining the information embedded in ICT systems with the creative potential and knowledge embodied in people.
The digital divide remains stark but its character is changing. It is beginning to be as much one between rural and urban and rich and poor within countries, as one between countries. The spread of mobile telephony has been extraordinarily rapid. Taking Africa as a whole, last year more than 13 million people were added to the mobile phone network, and this is probably an underestimate. Radio, however, and particularly community radio, remains the most widespread technology, though even this is not accessible to all.
The Roundtable came up with a series of recommendations. These included scaling up and better resourcing Communication for Development; building a communication component into development projects from inception; ensuring that national frameworks support free and pluralistic information systems and community media; improving both research and training for Communication for Development practitioners; developing new tools and skills for evaluation and impact assessments; building alliances, and fostering local, national and regional Communication for Development processes.
A number of new initiatives on communication for sustainable development were presented and noted, including the proposed 2005 World Congress on Communication for Development, and proposals from Onda Rural, the University of Queensland Clearing house and the UN Network on Rural Development. The Roundtable established the basis for a working group/network to foster global partnerships on Communication for Development and came up with a Plan of Action to be facilitated and monitored through the mechanism of the working group.
Finally, the Roundtable noted that communication is a means to sustainable development and not an end in itself. Communication can play an important role in reducing poverty, providing people are involved in the process of their own development. As Italian Minister Campo put in his opening address: “Without communication, there can be no democracy, and without democracy, there can be no liberation”.
