Health communication, HIV/AIDS, social mobilisation, learning evaluation, capacity building

People and their communities acting as agents of their own change: this is the essence of the Communication for Social Change approach. Rob Vincent, Deputy Director of Exchange, explains how it is being applied in East and Southern Africa.

Exchange is working with the Rockefeller Foundation and UNICEF in Ethiopia and Zambia to make Communication for Social Change (CFSC) programming a reality on the ground.

In a concerted effort to find a different way of programming, a wide range of partners in each country are working to coordinate key aspects of HIV and AIDS strategy, using the bottom-up, community empowerment emphasis of CFSC. UNICEF and its partners have already been working creatively with rights-based programming, ‘appreciative enquiry’ approaches and community dialogue[1].

Joining forces in CFSC places an additional emphasis on strategic communication, so that the voices and priorities of the most disadvantaged can be central to the response to HIV and AIDS.

The Communication for Social Change approach puts an emphasis on people and communities as agents of their own change. Developed under the auspices of the Rockefeller Foundation, the approach has its roots in participatory communication and the ‘popular education’ of Paulo Freire, but brings an added emphasis placed on strategic communication. It aims to encourage community empowerment and create an environment that enables change, making use of a variety of communication media to amplify the voices and concerns of the most disadvantaged, and bring them into public debate.

Communication for Social Change is a process orientated approach, rather than one that focuses on delivering messages, and is based on a belief that behaviour change is dependent on social change, and is a long-term process.

A challenge for CFSC programming is to find ways of working that truly build on local initiatives and priorities. For this, development practitioners need to keep their ears to the ground and eyes open, so that emerging local initiatives can be supported and strengthened. Rather than planning programmes externally as outsiders, this puts the processes of listening, facilitation and robust dialogue at the centre of development work.

CFSC does not try to replicate what has worked well in one setting and ‘scale it up’ to apply it elsewhere; instead it attempts to link a range of initiatives that are already working well in different contexts. In this way, by working to increase dialogue and feedback between diverse initiatives to share their local successes, CFSC functions with an alternative ‘association’ model of scale.

Communities are resourceful and local people should be agents of their own change, but they are not responsible for most of the wider economic and political factors that constrain their life choices. So, while the emphasis of CFSC is on setting priorities locally, it is equally important to foster dialogue and communication around these priorities in wider public forums to promote social change, including policy and political change.

Evaluation of CFSC is another challenge. Exchange is part of an international team developing monitoring and evaluation methods appropriate for tracking public dialogue and empowerment, as well as the bottomup, emergent, networked character of Communication for Social Change.

Reference
[1] Ford, N., Odallo, D., Chorlton, R. (2003) ‘Communication from a Human Rights Perspective: Responding to the HIV/AIDS Pandemic in Eastern and Southern Africa’, Journal of Health Communication, Vol 8 No 6

This article also appeared in July 2004 in issue 1 of TheLink, the joint newsletter from Healthlink Worldwide and Exchange. A PDF of the newsletter is available on the Healthlink Worldwide website.

Communication for Social Change: a new approach to programming in Africa