Communication for Social Change: International Community/Challenges

I wish to address two main points:

1. On – the donor perspective - is to briefly introduce how Danida is addressing HIV/AIDS and how they are using communication in this endeavour. Being a relatively new player in this field, Danida confronts a number of challenges, of which the most relevant for us here today, is how to implement communication for social change





2. The other point, is as a researcher in this field. How do we evaluate social change communication? I would like to recommend further attention given to two areas of research which deserve closer connection to the practice of development communication in general and HIV/AIDS communication in particular. These areas are: long-term evaluation + a stronger emphasis on in-depth qualitative studies when evaluation communication programmes.

My background for being here today is; I am a media scholar, having done a Ph.D on soap operas and everyday life in Brazil. Currently I coordinate a Danida-financed research project dealing with HIV/AIDS Communication and Prevention, focusing on three countries with different epidemiological characteristics: South Africa, Burkina Faso and Vietnam. I also do consultancy, especially in the field of development communication.

1. An initial comment on how we understand Social Change.

• Social Change Communication is a concept which still needs elaboration and precision. Dispite the tone of consensus I have heard here today, I believe we need to explore critically and constructively how far we actually agree: how far are we, the donors, willing to go in supporting social change processes. In other words: What do we mean by ‘social change'? Are we speaking of mobilising people in focused interventions or are we speaking of altering structures in society? More studies a la Rockefeller and Soul City's work are needed.
• Doesn't all communication articulate change? Communication is always with somebody, it is a social practice, which I would argue always leads to social change.

So, we should clarify what the vision is that drives our social change communication initiative. How far do we want to go?

I agree very much with James Deane and others in their call for addressing the causes of HIV/AIDS requires that we address very deep-lying and complex problematics touching fundamental structural determinants of society. However, this poses some large methodological challenges which need substantial theoretical and methodological reflection on previous experiences.

2. What does Danida do?

Danida's recent take on this has been to speak of communication for poverty reduction – coincides with their overall development objective of reducing poverty. I believe this points towards a broad understanding of communication, but equally lacks clarity, and is far from having been conceptualised and sought operationalized to the degree of Rockefeller's initiative on CSC.

Danida has:

• A new development policy in place, adopted one year ago. In this one, Danida stresses their HIV/AIDS focus being on prevention.
• An HIV/AIDS action plan which, roughly speaking, involves 3 types of response:

A. SWAP

• The idea is to mainstream HIV/AIDS into potentially all 20 program countries. So far Mozambique is furthest, and processes of mainstreaming are underway in Malawi, Zambia and Central America (Nicaragua)
• Danida has developed guidelines to guide their initial assessment to responding to HIV/AIDS, and in these guidelines, quite reasonable (from a Com.Dev perspective) attention is actually given to assessing existing communication strategies and analysing country experiences, media infrastructure and media environment.

B. Thematised Funds

• This is channelled through multilateral mechanisms, to programme countries in particular, but not exclusively. This will grow substantially in the years to come.

C. NGOs

• a limited amount available here. It can pose a problem for large NGOs to access funds in Danida, especially larger international NGOs or also large national NGOs involved in large scale, often expensive, communication interventions in this field.

Seen from a Danida perspective, I believe there are some problems between policy and practice:

• Recognizing the multisectoral nature of the pandemic – but basically providing sectoral response (although attempting otherwise in ie MOZ)
• Wishing to support prevention, but finds only people who support treatment and care (ie Nicaragua and Honduras). This touches upon the whole issue of remedicalisation.
• Very incipient resource base on HIVAIDS (weak Danish resource base)
• Where do we spend our money most adecuately: combating a raging pandemic in Southern Africa, or in supporting countries with incipient epidemics, as Nicaragua?
• How should our balance be between support to treatment and to prevention
• Where should the HIV/AIDS donor response be based within the organisation?
• What technical assistance should we draw on: locals in the countries we work with, Danes, or international experts?
• How should Danida – and other donors - tackle ‘lack of political commitment in a developing country?'

And finally:

• What role should communication play? This is where this Roundtable Forum particularly should come up with input and secure a close dialogue with the donors.

On the technical side, vis-à-vis the role of communication, Danida is very open – as I interprete it, very willing to listen and receive professional input. They do not have a clear cut communication approach here, and practical and clear recommendations from a forum like this can play a relevant and important role in guiding them in their response. As part of what could be seen as a ‘call for response' and to promote exchange of experiences, Danida in June this year, organised and hosted a Euro-American Donor seminar gathering a group of donors to discuss communication for development. The draft report has just come out and is available for revision in the lobby.

3. How do we evaluate social change communication?

My second point to make today, is to comment on the necessary research agendas that hopefully can move this field further, both in learning from previous experience as in improving in designing better communication strategies tackling the complexity of HIV/AIDS.

Wishing to design and evaluate social change communications requires a whole range of new questions brought to the table, and new ways of thinking in evaluation.

We need to ask questions that bring us deeper into understanding change processes in a community.

And an important point to make in this context is that we should consider the evaluation not as a complicating addendum to a program, but as part of the whole change process per se!

Basically, I wish to point at two necessary elements where we have not been good enough in evaluations and where there is potential for drawing on existing scientific communities, academics, to improve the way we evaluate social change communication:

a. Better evaluation of long-terms changes

We need to do another kind of longitudinal studies that focus on the change process, identify them, and analyse both individual practices, policy changes, structural developments, cultural developments, change in power structures, etc to capture the complexity of the change process. Part of this process is also to historisize the community development and the interventions: what interventions have been seen over the past years?

Taking Soul City: in a sentinel site, what impact has 7 years of Soul City campaign had, and what other campaigns have been around in that same period?

So, recalling also what Neil Ford and his colleague emphasized in their intervention to the Roundtable debate: we have to ask other questions that address the causes of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, and that explore how our interventions address and influence these deeper-lying determinants of inequity, marginalisation, etc.

As I see it, this requires broad social and cultural analysis, and thus requires anthropologists, sociologists and maybe even historians and political scientists.

b. We need better in-depth audience studies

Maintaining the focus on individual campaign interventions, there still remains a lot to be done going in-depth in the analysis of how these campaigns feed into the dynamics of everyday life. How do people make sense of the issues and messages that the campaigns highlight? We are here dealing with not only a very complex issue filled with taboos, but also with a phenomenon linked to a very intimate part of our lives: that is, our sexual behaviour! This demands a very high degree of sensitivity in a process of inquiry, be it in formative or summative research.

More practically, we need to know to what degree do the audiences engage in the content of the communication vehicles, how do they engage in the problematic, and how is this identification process and audience engagement brought on out into their everyday life: does it pop up in conversations, does it interfere in their norms, attitudes and practices? And how sustainable is this interference over time. How do these campaigns interact with the social and cultural practices of audience lives?

In professional terms, this element of evaluation needs to draw on experiences from qualitative audience research, audience ethnography in particular. There is an unexplored resource here!

4. How do we operationalize this?

A way to operationalize this could be by strengthening the local research capacity in the countries and regions we are dealing with. In other words, we nee to get hold of the research-related budget lines in the donor community. In Denmark, one option is to explore the ENRECA-programme. It's the Enhanced Research Capacity-programme, which funds research cooperation with developing countries in programmes of typically 10-12 even 15 years of duration.

There is seemingly at very strong need to strengthen the research capacity in many countries: I have been inquiring about Nicaragua, and apparently there is a major lack of research capacity in this field of development communication. Likewise in many many developing countries. During a recent Euro-American donor seminar in Copenhagen, this came up recurrently: the need to enhance national research capacity.

In the case of Danida, in addition to these ENRECA-programmes which must be explored to the advantage of this thematic field, Danida is, with other budget lines, now setting up a research center in Eastern or Southern Africa, most probably in Tanzania, with the aim to collect data, monitor and evaluate the impact of HIV/AIDS interventions in the region.

Conclusion:

So, to conclude, I believe we still have a long way to go. We have to be creative, we have to fundamentally rethink and reassess how we have done evaluations, and explore – among others points – the above two poorly explored areas of research. As the professional community, we have not been good enough in learning from experience and responding efficiently. This challenge must be taken up.

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