PARTICIPATION IN MEDIA, LEARNING AND COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT

By Ian Pringle, COL Education Specialist, Media

A big part of Learning for Development – especially relevant to COL’s Livelihoods and Health sector – concerns non-formal education, the sort of somewhat-organised learning that takes place outside of traditional institutions and within the context of everyday life.

Without the captive audience of a formal structured system, community learning relies to a great degree on conversation as the basic model for learning. It’s a variation on the teacher-student relationship that positions learners as active participants, an intrinsic part of the back-and-forth exchange between and among people and groups that builds mutual understanding.

If our focus is health or livelihoods, people also need to be part of actions that learning aims to enable as part of a larger process of development. As community members, learners also need to be involved in identifying issues and making decisions about the conversation in the first place: What will it be about? Who will be involved? How will it be organised? When will it end?

A sound investment

Increasing participation in learning and development processes – everything from identifying learning needs to designing programming, creating content, talking about it and providing feedback – is a good strategy and a sound investment.

Whether it’s part of a conversation, a communication programme or a development project, participation helps to ensure relevance in planning and responsiveness in implementation.

What’s particularly significant for COL’s work with open and distance learning (ODL) in non-formal contexts – and a salient feature in COL’s ongoing partnership with UNESCO in the area of development communication – is that participation simultaneously facilitates effective learning and enables better collective, collaborative responses to development challenges such as maternal and child health and HIV/AIDS.

Participation as conversation

Without dialogue there is no communication, and without communication there can be no true education.
— Paulo Freire, The Pedagogy of the Oppressed

A wise man, Zane Ibramhim of Bush Radio, once said that community media are 90 per cent community and only 10 per cent radio. The technology is, at best, secondary to community participation in decision-making, organisation and programming. Community media strategies, practices and technologies offer compelling models for participation in communication for development, models that speak clearly to the application of new media (such as the web and mobile phones) as tools for education and development.

Participatory media

Community media are well positioned to be participatory (although whether or not they succeed is another question). They function locally, generally at a relatively small scale, often on the margins. Their content, ideally, deals with local issues. Broadcasting uses local dialects. Overall, community media operate as part of the local cultural contexts and, for the most part, reach only local audiences.

In Isabel, an island province in Solomon Islands with a population of some 30,000, ten distinct languages and no roads or electrical grid, the local media stations serve communities of 3,000-4,000 people using low-power FM and two-way radiophones, email and, increasingly, mobile phones. The Isabel Learning Network is a partnership of Isabel Province, the Ministry of Health, People First Network, the Solomon Islands Development Trust and COL.

To varying degrees, be it on cable TV or the Internet, community-based communication depends on community members, not only as active users and audience but also as contributors and collaborators, both in the creation of content and in translating what’s learnt into action.

“The community are simultaneously listeners, learners and actors in the community development process,” says Mr. David Leeming, a longtime intervenor in developing educational technologies in Isabel.

In India, the Commonwealth Educational Media Centre for Asia (CEMCA), supported by the Department of Science and Technology, is spearheading “Science for Women”, an interactive radio series that reaches an estimated 12,000 people – mostly women – through 15- to 30-minute segments. The focus is on health and nutrition. This is a participatory process that includes the students and listening communities – the women learn radio production skills and create relevant content using information provided by university partners. In addition to providing valuable health information, “Science for Women” is creating a bank of content that can be re-used. It is helping women gain skills as announcers, interviewers and writers, while also providing a source of earning a livelihood.

Filling your bag of life

In Mchinji District, Malawi, community groups, media and health authorities are working together on a learning programme about maternal and child health called Phukusi la Moyo (literally “Bag of Life”). The name comes from a local traditional Chewa proverb: Phukusi la moyo umasunga wekha (everyone should jealously protect their own bag of life). This proverb teaches that everyone is responsible for their own lives and health and should have a full bag of skills, knowledge and experiences, which they can use when needed. The hope is that the radio programmes will be a source from which people living in Mchinji can draw to fill their bags of life and safeguard mother and child health.

Phukusi la Moyo is a collaboration between communities in Mchinji, MaiMwana Trust (a community-based maternal and child health non-governmental organisation), Mchinji District Health Office, Mudzi Wathu Community Radio Station, Story Workshop (an educational media production group) and COL.

At the centre of the programme is the MaiMwana network of 200 women’s groups established in 2004 to reduce maternal and child mortality. Towards the end of a five-year cycle, the groups identified mass media as a communication strategy and, when the stars aligned and made a radio programme a reality, they played a key role in designing it. Now they listen each week and discuss the programme content including how to organise based on what they’ve heard and learned.

As can be seen with Phukusi la Moyo, community media can effectively meet the information and communication needs of a particular group of people through specific types of programming, for example pregnant women and new mothers learning about maternal and child health. To do this, these same stakeholders must be involved in making decisions about needs and priorities, about formats and content, and about ongoing evaluation and design.

Phukusi la Moyo was designed in a five-day workshop sponsored by COL and run by Story Workshop in April 2009 that brought together representatives of the women’s network, local health authorities and producers from the local community radio. Together they decided on key messages, a suitable radio format and a plan for 13 episodes. They established a core group, including designated representatives of the women’s network as well as the health authorities, to manage the programme on an ongoing basis.

A follow-up series of workshops, involving nearly 600 women from 200 groups, helped to popularise the strategy and create a system for learner support and feedback. MaiMwana’s face-to-face network reaches thousands of pregnant women, new mothers and their families in over 350 villages, nearly a quarter of the district’s population of 380,000.

Getting engaged

As is the case in Mchinji, when community members participate actively they are engaged, not just as an audience and potential listeners but also as learners and community members; not only participants in the process of developing learning programmes but also in mobilising based on what the community as a whole is learning.

In Mchinji, participation happens in different ways. Each episode includes between two and ten community voices from two, three or more village areas. Monitoring reports in November 2009 from 120 groups indicate that as many as 3,500 women from across the district, primarily pregnant women and new mothers, were listening and discussing the programme on a weekly basis.

Women and other community members also participate indirectly through the MaiMwana network’s representative structure, in which village-based groups nominate representatives to zones, nodes and finally a district-level committee. Members of the district committee, representing as many as 10,000 women, were part of the design workshop and continue to be an active part of the core team.

Community learning

Participation is also part of making programme content, but not in the way one might expect. In Phukusi la Moyo the actual production – recording, editing and broadcasting – is left up to producers and volunteers from Mudzi Wathu Community Radio; however community participation is still central to the success of the programme.

While community members don’t actually create the content, their stories and experiences make up the most important part of the programme’s learning content. The programme’s approach focuses on the shared experiences of pregnant women, new mothers, fathers and other community members, voiced in their own words. It is essentially an extension of the conversation that women’s groups were having face-to-face.

“People need to speak the way they feel, not the way you feel,” explains Gladson Makowa from Story Workshop. “The main way and the best way is storytelling: an individual talking about him or herself as an individual, for example what she went through when she took the drug which was injected giving birth, how she was saved, what she remembered most, etc. People are moved by these stories.”

Learning and collective response are reinforced each week through group meetings in the MaiMwana network, in which both women and men listen, break down content, discuss the issues among themselves and plan actions. The combination of media content and face-to-face interaction is a fundamental reason why Phukusi la Moyo and other programmes like it can be considered community learning programmes.

Participating in collaboration

Participation should also be seen to extend beyond learners to experts and facilitators. The collaboration of different groups, for example local health services and community media outlets, is essential in developing high-quality learning programmes: accurate in terms of content and engaging in terms of format and style. Although people may learn more effectively from shared experience, the endorsement of health professionals is essential in ensuring veracity and trust.

In addition to sharing the experience of health care clients, Phukusi la Moyo has also helped to convey the human face of healthcare workers in the eyes of community members. And it also helps inform health and media workers about the realities of health in community contexts.

Done right, participatory media initiatives extend on the power of conversation as a tool for learning. As a mass medium, radio, for example, adds considerable scale – Phukusi la Moyo enlarges the scope of participation from thousands of women in the face-to-face network to tens or even hundreds of thousands across the whole district.

After a year of sponsorship from COL, funding for Phukusi la Moyo has been taken over by Mchiniji District Assembly, a result of the active participation of the District Health Office and Hospital. The depth of participation, the role of media, and the impact on maternal and child mortality are the focus on ongoing research. So, as we say in radio, “Stay tuned….”

www.col.org/HealthyCommunities