Communication for Rural Development

 

Asian countries over the past 50 years have experienced remarkably rapid economic development and social change at varying levels. Fundamentally, these changes were driven by dramatic breakthroughs in health and family planning technology. But this kind of demographic transition has provided favourable conditions for development and modernisation, which progressed very quickly in the countries of East Asia.

Global agreement on various development issues and policies was significantly achieved at many international conferences. It is now very clear that a good communication and advocacy is vital for any development on ground as also for behavioural change. Through a skilled process of communication and advocacy on issues, Governments can forge a programme of action that reflects a new strategy for development.

The role of communication for development first came into being in the 1960s. Today, in many countries, communication has shown its usefulness and impact in change and development activities. Nonetheless, it would appear that the use of communication and advocacy has been limited to the behavioural goal of getting a policy adopted, not necessarily having it implemented. Following the model of development communication, public health communication attracted more donors and friendly policies from government and communication scholars, institutions to design, implement and evaluate innovative communication programmes aimed at behaviour change.

Communication forms the basis for creating awareness, consensus building, generating participation in the processes of change and development, making informed decisions and resolving conflicts. A series of world conferences on various socio-economic issues in recent years have been convened and implicitly called for the use of communication to help achieve development goals and to help individuals, communities and societies to accept change.

Barely 20 years ago health communication programmes had broken historic ground by insisting on strategies based upon the individual’s own perspective and upon research into the actual perceptions, needs and practices of people. India, the first country to have adopted population policies in the early 1950s, used the print media and other means to promote its family planning programme. In 1984, India began broadcasting the first soap opera with social content titled Hum Log (We People). The programme included promotion of family planning and elevation of the status of women through famous actors and characters. Broadcast for over 17 months, the episodes of this serial achieved viewer ratings of 60 to 90 per cent. Research conducted by Everett Rogers and Arvind Singhal, then of the Annenberg School of Communications, University of Southern California, revealed through a sample survey that 70 per cent of the viewers indicated that they had learned from the soap opera that women should have equal opportunities, 68 per cent learned that women should have the freedom to make their personal decisions in life, and 71 per cent learned that family size should be limited. Among other things, the programme stimulated over 400,000 people to write letters to the Indian television authority as also to various stars in the programme, stating their views on the issues being dealt with, or asking for help and advice.

Social change is linked to concerted public action. Be it in population programmes, protection of the environment, proper use and conservation of natural resources or increasing food production, communication can introduce change among large numbers of individuals in society in the way they live and work, thus making a difference.

While working on ground for last 25 years, Development Alternatives (DA) has successfully used various forms of development communications. For critical issues like drinking water, water management for agriculture, climate change adaptation, women empowerment, environment protection, etc., it has been experienced that communication plays an important role in communicating the message and bringing about a change. Bundelkhand, a semi-arid region of central India where DA is working extensively, is always faced with challenges that hinder implementation of development plans. Challenges vary from non-receptive audience and social barriers to unfriendly government policies. These challenges can only be dealt with good communication strategy and advocacy at all levels. Selection of communication tools is critical in this kind of a situation.

For decades, popular and advocacy strategies have been information based and source oriented. They were driven more by an enchantment with media, segmented audiences, materials development and the goal of awareness creation rather than development messages. Looking at the 30-year history of family planning Information, Education and Commercial (IEC) materials, the shift in focus has tended to centre around the issue of which medium or technology would be more powerful and effective, including audio-visual aids with field personnel, mass media, small media, folk media, entertainment-education approaches. At times, great emphasis was placed on small media such as flannel-graphs or the use of puppets. Then the interest turned to slide-and-sound presentations and film strips. The use of video was heralded at one stage as a breakthrough technology. During the 1990s, the bells were ringing for radio and television ‘enter-educate’ programmes and soap operas.

While designing the communication strategy for a project dealing with creating awareness for climate change adaptation, the team was very careful in choosing the communication tools. Instead of choosing regular communication tools traditional tools like village theatre, folk songs, community radio, wall paintings were used. The impact evaluation of the situation presented a very promising picture. The result shows that a combination of traditional and modern communication tools and entertainment based information delivery has been accepted quite positively by the rural communities. There is better chance of creation of recall value among the audience. For effective rural communication, the development messages may contain entertainment-education performances of folk media, including puppetry, street theatre, ballad songs, poetry and riddles intended to stimulate dialogue between communities, policy makers and service providers.

There is strong evidence in a number of countries that the mass media, particularly the entertainment broadcast media, have played a significant role in bringing about changes in practices. The entertainment-education method, has recently demonstrated impressive behavioural impact. In developed as well as developing countries, there is still considerable skepticism as to whether providing access to information and communication technology (ICT) can play a significant role in bringing behavioural changes. Certainly, ICT cannot by itself bring an end to the problem. ICT is simply a tool, and no single tool or set of tools can solve a global problem having multiple and extremely complex causes. ICT is not a ‘magic bullet’, but depending upon how it is employed it does provide powerful ammunition in the fight against the problem.

From the above discussion it might seem that communication alone could solve all the problems of social change and development. However, people may be fully motivated and willing to change, but if the physical possibilities for that change are not present, the process will remain stillborn. A farmer may be ready to adopt climate-friendly irrigation methods, but if the services are not available locally at a price he can afford, he will not be able to improve himself. Thus, a combination of communication and advocacy can help to create demand in certain circumstances and thus put pressure on the services to perform.

For proper achievement of communication goals, the strategy and action would call for some radical rethinking concerning the way things are done and currently organised. Behavioural change takes place more easily and rapidly when groups, even small ones, become involved in analysing information, discussing its relevance to their particular situation, internalising it and making decisions to take action. Also, any attempt to make communication a part of national development and enable people to change their behaviour depends on a democratic spirit among decision makers and on the political will to make it happen successfully. q

Soma Biswas
sbiswas@devalt.org