The The Ninth United Nations Inter-Agency Roundtable on Communication for Development brought together a wide variety of experts in the field from the four corners of the world. As well as the official presentations, working groups and discussions, there were many side events and group and individual meetings. Alliances were built or strengthened, tactics discussed and futures planned.
In his closing speech, UNESCO's Director of Communication Development, Wijayananda Jayaweera, said: “I believe that the debate, discussion, and discourse that we have shared during the past few days serve as a very important reminder that our work is crucial for:
There is no doubt that there are many challenges if the Millennium Development Goals are to be met. It is also clear that they cannot be met without communication, which has become increasingly important in our globalized and conflict-ridden world. James Deane notes in his paper: “Never before has communication across boundaries and between cultures been more important, and never before has global security depended on the existence of channels that promote such communication.”
And yet the beginning of the 21st century saw increased parochialism in communication channels. The changing nature of the media has made it more difficult to get the voices of the poor into public discourse, at precisely the time when they are most needed. The fast-moving nature of ICTs has made the digital divide an increasing problem. The increasingly complex and horizontal communication environments in which development strategies are currently deployed, the ever-increasing focus on the importance of ownership, as well as the failures of mainly vertical and top-down communication strategies – particularly in substantially mitigating the HIV/AIDS pandemic – all remain substantial challenges.
At the same time, there is increasing willingness of all levels, including UN agencies, to take communication seriously. As the Communication Initiative website demonstrates, there are also an extraordinary range and number of high quality and innovative communication interventions being implemented across the world by thousands of organizations. Jan Servaes and Patchanee Malikhao note that: “This is one of the most dynamic fields in the development arena... a complex mosaic of diverse local interventions.”
But in order to adapt to our changing world, Communication for Development also needs to learn from the past, to build alliances and to find new ways of working. John Monyo of FAO, in his opening address, noted that: “There is an urgent need to refine existing strategies or find new ones to implement communication for sustainable development programmes at community and local levels; to measure the impact of communication for sustainable development; and to formulate appropriate policy options in support of communication for sustainable development.”
To put this into practice, Communication for Development practitioners need to listen to marginalized peoples and learn from them. They need to show respect, to work on local content in local languages; to develop ways and means of communicating that are owned by communities and integrated into existing traditional communication systems.
The Roundtable Declaration and the recommendations from each of the three Working Groups have a number of practical suggestions for ways forward which are being implemented through the Plan of Action. There were many suggestions – on capacity building, measuring impact and developing better evaluation mechanisms and tools, building community media, up scaling small programmes, examining the nature of funding and how it needs to change, mixing new and traditional approaches, and building communication into programmes and projects from the start.
It is now time to put these into action.
1 Report of the International Expert Meeting on Communication for Development, organized by UNESCO in Delhi, September 2003.
2 Communication: a key to human development, Colin Fraser and Jonathan Villet, FAO, 1994.
3 Strategic Communication in PRSP, Masud Mozammel and Barbara Zatlokal, World Bank, 2003.
4 Taking Action: the UK's strategy for tackling HIV/AIDS in the developing world, Dfid, July 2004 (www.dfid.gov.uk).
5 World Telecommunication Development Report, ITU, 2003.
6 Completing the revolution: the challenge of rural telephony in Africa, by Murali Shanmugevelan and Kitty Warnock, Panos, 2004.
7 World Telecommunication Development Report, ITU, 2003.
8 www.thehoot.org
9 The media and the verdict of the election of 2004, Hoot Editorial, May 2004.
10 These arguments have been substantially expanded by this author and others in the Global Civil Society Yearbook 2002 published by the London School of Economics (www.lse.ac.uk/Depts/global/Yearbook) and updated more recently in The other information revolution: media and empowerment in developing countries, by James Deane with Fackson Banda, Kunda Dixit, Njonjo Mue and Silvio Waisbord in Communicating in the Information Society, by Ed Bruce Girard and Sean O'Siochru, UNRISD, 2003.
11 Involving the Community: A Facilitator's Guide to Participatory Development Communication, IDRC, Ottawa, and Southbound, Penang, by Guy Bessette, 2004.
12 Arabization for PRA Materials in the Documentation of the PRA Exchange Meeting: Challenging Practice Attitudes, NEF and CDS, 1997, Amman.
13 Richardson D., Ramirez R. and Haq M., 2000. “Grameen Telecom's Village Pay Phone Programme: A Multimedia Case Study”, CIDA.
