Communication for development (C4D) uses social engineering methods to integrate knowledge management into projects, enhance the value of local knowledge, promote concerted action, empower strategic project groups, capitalize on the latter and create communities of reflection and action around shared objectives.
It’s not a corporate communications or public relations campaign…
Corporate communications respond to image and visibility issues. It is often “top-down”: management communicates and passes on information. Unlike institutional communication, communication for development (C4D) integrates communication into actions and project teams. It is a “bottom-up” and “multidirectional” communication that feeds into all aspects of projects.
Communication for development is a social process based on dialogue, using a wide range of tools and methods. The aim is to bring about change at different levels, such as listening, building trust, sharing knowledge and skills, implementing policies, debating and learning about important and lasting changes. It’s not about deploying public relations or corporate communications campaigns.
Communication for development encompasses many media and approaches – folk media and traditional social groupings, rural radio for community development, video and multimedia modules for farmer training, and the Internet to connect researchers, educators, extension workers and producer groups to each other and to global information sources. Whether villages are connected to the outside world by modern telecommunications networks, learn about health care from sayings and folk songs, or listen to radio broadcasts on best farming practices, the processes are the same – people communicate and learn together.
Communication technologies are anything but neutral. They influence social relations, anticipate them, moderate them” Michel Sauquet The economic and social development of the world’s less affluent areas presupposes, among other factors, communication approaches and techniques, both traditional and modern, that enable :
1. expression of the rationale, know-how and needs of the populations concerned;
2. the exchange and transfer of methodologies and technologies. At the root of the Foundation’s thinking on communication for development is a concern: how can the “voiceless” and marginalized groups use communication to make themselves heard and gain a measure of power?
For the Foundation, communication is defined as “a set of diversified social practices, a constellation of social processes”. It is a “multifaceted process that cannot be summed up by the famous ICTs (information and communication technologies), but also encompasses a multitude of popular practices […] through which social groups […] strive to make themselves heard, to be recognized as interlocutors, to advance democracy at both local and national levels.
Communication for social change is defined as a process of public and private dialogue through which people define who they are, what they want and how they can get it. Social change is a self-defined change in people’s lives. In particular, this work seeks to improve the lives of those who are politically and economically marginalized, according to principles of tolerance, self-determination, equity, social justice and active participation for all.
