divorce over the toothpaste

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NGOs and Communication: Divorce over the Toothpaste

Alfonso Gumucio-Dagron

Introduction

Exactly the same happens with NGOs and communication as with multilateral organiza-tions (UN) or bilateral agencies: they don’t get it. Both imagine communication as insti-tutional visibility or, in the best scenario, as information dissemination. None understands the role of communication as facilitating dialogue, enhancing participation in the deci-sion-making process and ensuring sustainability of social and economic change.

This is particularly worrying in the world of development NGOs, since they are supposed to be closer to communities, working for the well-being of people at the grass-roots, the ‘poorest of the poor’. Communication should be their daily currency to relate to development issues and social change, but instead is generally ignored or misunder-stood. There should be a perfect marriage between communication and non-govern-mental organizations to avoid red tape in their work, but instead, it is like a couple who don’t get along because of the toothpaste or the toilet seat.

No matter how important ‘communication’ sounds in the discourse of all interna-tional development organizations, including the smallest national NGOs and the World Bank, the fact is that none, or very few, has a sincere, consequent and clear understanding of communication as a privileged approach to development and civic driven social change.

This assertion is easily sustained when putting NGOs under the light of three main criteria:

1 Have they developed their own communication policy?2 Have they allocated sufficient funds to communication?3 Have they hired staff who are specialized in communication for development and

social change?

The answer to these three questions might be ‘no’ three times in a row, particularly because the three criteria are interdependent. We cannot imagine better allocating funds or hiring high-level professional communication staff if there are no policies in place that commit the organization to an approach to communication that diverges from the business-as-usual information dissemination and propaganda.

300 Management Applications

Policies and strategiesEvery organization involved in development has a defined policy and strategy that guides its operations and its mere existence. The policy is based on a philosophy of social change, a conceptual framework where the general objectives are set and justification is provided on ‘why’ the organization gets involved in a particular field of work.

Without analysis and internal discussion of the principles and without a vision and mission, an organization would have a hard time setting up a policy that guides its work; and without a policy there cannot be a strategy that lays out the concrete plan to accom-plish. Organizations normally have a mission, a vision and a policy paper that covers the mains issues they are dealing with (health, human rights, education, etc) but very seldom have they reflected on ‘how’ they communicate in a concrete reality in a geographical space or defined human universe.

Communication is essential to ‘how’ an intervention is implemented; at least that is what most organizations would declare. However very few have taken steps in the direc-tion that is needed: discussion of what kind of communication in order to define a philosophy or conceptual framework, as well as an institutional policy from which strat-egies will flow.

Allocation of fundsMost organizations allocate funds for ‘communication’, but their understanding of communication is so confused that the funds are usually utilized for information dissemination through mass media and/or for institutional propaganda through commercial advertising agencies. People with whom they work are absent since commu-nication is conceived as a bunch of messages to deliver, and not as a process of estab-lishing channels of dialogue with people.

Funding related to information and communication should be clearly separated, because the usual tendency is that information dissemination and institutional image building will take the lion’s share and very little will be left for real communication activities that entail participation in the process of change.

Funding specifically marked for communication activities is the guarantee of civic-driven change where people have their say. It is very important that NGOs (and any other development organizations) transcend the vertical ways of operating, where deci-sions are made at the top by those who attract the funding or those that get it in the name of the communities in need.

The World Congress of Communication for Development (WCCD) held in Rome in 2006 clearly recommended that funds should be specifically assigned to communica-tion for development. During the discussions at the WCCD, it was agreed that at least a 6 per cent of the funding of each programme or project should be marked for commu-nication for development.

Qualified staffIn the hypothetical scenario that an NGO has developed its conceptual framework, a policy paper and a strategy for communication for development and social change, and

NGOs and Communication: Divorce over the Toothpaste 301

has also allocated a percentage of funding to the specific activities, the NGO still needs qualified and experienced professionals to lead the conceptual platform and to imple-ment the strategy.

The word ‘qualified’ is not negligible because we have seen too much improvization both in NGOs and in other international development organizations, who are used to assigning communication responsibilities to anyone, even someone not related to communication, or outsourcing to advertising agencies.

The worst case I have seen is assigning communication responsibilities to staff who are otherwise ‘doing nothing’ (in other words, who have plenty of time for it). The second worst case I have seen too often is assigning communication responsibilities to medical staff (nurses, doctors) on health programmes or to engineers on safe water projects with the ridiculous argument that ‘everyone has to be a communicator’. It is like saying that anyone should be able to compile statistics or draw up public health plans just because it is much needed.

This approach taken by development bureaucrats, never by communication special-ists, leads to varnishing staff from any sector with a coat of short-term workshops where they learn generalities. In my work in UNICEF, in Africa and Latin America, I have seen staff permanently away from work because of this workshop culture that has blossomed.

Hiring journalists to do the work of communicators is also a bad idea and it doesn’t work at all. It works for information dissemination, producing messages, posters or press conferences, but it doesn’t work in support of a communication process that is inclusive and democratic, horizontal and dialogic.

At the World Congress of Communication for Development (WCCD) participants specifically argued that the academic field of communication for development needs to be strengthened to meet the needs of high-level posts for communication professionals in NGOs and other international development and aid organizations.

The Rome Consensus

The WCCD was a milestone for development communication, not only because of its discussions and final recommendations, which are the daily bread of development communicators in the world over decades, but particularly because of the level and influence of the three organizations that organized the congress: the Food and Agricul-tural Organization (FAO), the World Bank and the Communication Initiative.

The final document, the ‘Rome Consensus’, should be a key reference document for all organizations getting involved in another communication for another development. These were the recommendations:

1 Overall national development policies should include specific communication for development components

2 Development organizations should include communication for development as a central element at the inception of programmes

3 Communication for development capacity should be strengthened within coun-tries and organizations at all levels. This includes people in their communities,


communication for development specialists and other staff, including through the further development of training courses and academic programmes

4 The level of financial investment should be expanded to ensure adequate, coordi-nated, financing of the core elements of communication for development as outlined under Strategic Requirements above. This includes budget line[s] for development communication

5 Policies and legislation that provide an enabling environment for communication for development should be adopted and implemented – including free and plural-istic media, the right to information and to communication

6 Development communication programmes should be required to identify and include appropriate monitoring and evaluation indicators and methodologies throughout the process

7 Partnerships and networks should be strengthened at international, national and local levels to advance communication for development and improve develop-ment outcomes

8 There should be a move towards a rights-based approach to communication for development.

And the entire document ended: ‘As Nelson Mandela highlighted it is people that make the difference. Communication is about people. Communication for development is essential to make the difference happen.’1

The Role of Universities

Universities and research centres can play an important role in development when they break out of the ivory tower and apply to reality the theoretical construction they have been working on. In terms of communication, NGOs should outsource to universities that have communication departments with emphasis in communication and social change, rather than using advertising agencies to promote important development issues as if they were a soft drink or a travel destination.

True, very few universities are currently equipped to offer the profile of communica-tion professionals that are needed. Most even equate ‘communication’ departments or faculties to the old journalism schools.2 Someone, four decades ago, had the bright idea of changing the name of journalism studies to ‘social communication’, a brand that is now current in thousands of universities that, in fact, basically train journalists for the media (print, television, radio, film), for public relations (pretty faces) and to be adver-tising designers. All of these are technical careers that have little to do with the mission of higher education which is to develop science and knowledge. Thousands of these students graduate every year all over the world and too many are desperately looking for jobs in television, newspapers or advertising agencies. Often they end up writing corpo-rate newsletters, press releases or organizing press conferences.

Ironically, on the other hand, many communication professionals are needed in development to support participatory processes for civic-driven change. When a devel-opment programme is looking for this profile of communicator, usually hundreds of


journalists apply. Which is why things are as they are: just look at the zillions spent in ineffective campaigns for HIV-AIDS in Africa. In contrast, communication as a partic-ipatory process implemented by many NGOs in Brazil since the 1980s has contributed to halt HIV-AIDS. South Africa and Brazil had similar statistics in the early 1980s in relation to AIDS; today there is a world of difference.

Several thousand universities in the world offer studies in journalism (so called ‘social communication’) and hundreds offer postgraduate studies (diplomas, masters or other specialization) focusing on mass media, corporate ‘communication’ and the like. Fewer than 25 universities worldwide offer specialization in communication for devel-opment and social change.

Asia was the first region to acknowledge the importance of this field. More than 30 years ago the university of The Philippines at Los Baños started a development commu-nication programme in support of rural community development. Today, it is the only university that offers Communication for Development studies at three levels: graduate, masters and PhD. In India, three universities hold the banner: the Centre of Commu-nication for Development (CDC) at the University of Gujarat and two masters degrees at University of Pantnagar and Jamia Millia Islamia in Delhi. Pakistan has the Centre for Rural Development Communication (CRDC) at the University of Sindh near Jamshoro.

Latin America has also traditionally been fertile ground for the development of communication studies, partly because it is in this region where dependency theories came to life and the first criticism of ‘diffusion of innovation’ – the US academic cornerstone for development communication – was formulated. The Universidad de La Plata in Argentina offers the prestigious masters degree on planning and management of communication programmes (PLANGESCO), while more recent and less established initiatives exist in Peru, Uruguay, Bolivia, Colombia, Guatemala and Cuba. Ironically two large countries with deep social inequalities, such as Brazil and Mexico, do not have universities offering specialized studies in communication for development and social change.

There are very few courses in Africa, where most are focused on journalism and democracy, which is understandable: the first and most urgent priority in countries that have lived or are still under strong authoritarian rules is to gain space for free press and freedom of expression. Communication for development should be the concern of NGOs or the United Nations concern, if at all, but not of universities, with one or two exceptions, such as the diploma and MA. Theatre and Media Communication in Devel-opment is offered by the University of Malawi.

Two universities in Spain (Universidad Internacional de Andalucia and Univer-sidad de Salamanca) offer recently created masters degrees on communication for development. In Sweden, University of Malmo in conjunction with Roskilde Univer-sity in Denmark, has promoted this emphasis in their communication studies. The United Kingdom offers an MSc in Media, Communication and Development at the London School of Economics (LSE), and though the word communication is not mentioned in the MA on Participation, Power and Social Change at the Institute for Development Studies (IDS) in Sussex, much of their work is conceptually similar to communication for development. A similar example is the Institute of Social Studies (ISS) in The Hague. Other European countries with large bilateral cooperation agen-cies and many development NGOs seem oblivious of the importance of communica-tion in development and civic-driven change.


In the US and Canada we can only mention two examples. Ohio University has a prestigious and multicultural MA in International Affairs: Communication and Devel-opment Studies (MAIA), whereas The School of Environmental Design and Rural Development at The University of Guelph in Canada offers an online certificate in Communication Process: Bridging Theory and Practice.

It is worth noting that most of the specialized studies in communication for development have not grown out of the classic ‘social communication’ (journalism) schools, but from other areas related to research and praxis in rural development, health or human rights.

NGOs should develop better links with the universities mentioned above, in their respective regions, for at least two main reasons: a) to help to define the profile of studies needed for a facilitator of civic-driven change with development communication skills, and b) to hire from among university graduates the communicators they really need for their development programmes, instead of journalists or public relations managers.

Rights-based Approach

Most NGOs now claim that their work is conceptually guided by a ‘rights-based approach’. This has become another buzzword not only for NGOs, but also for United Nations agencies and funds such as UNICEF.

Rights are entitlements and norms that establish constraints and obligations in the interactions between people and/or institutions, based on the principle that every human being is entitled to minimum conditions of freedom and dignity, regardless of nationality, origin, gender, skin colour, religion, language or any other status. Human rights protect people from political, legal, social and other abuses.

With respect to human rights, international laws include: procedural rights (to acquire information and access justice) and substantive rights (to life, health, education, culture, communication and freedom from discrimination, political rights). Rights are universal (apply to anyone and everywhere in the world), indivisible (they all have equal status for human dignity), interrelated and interdependent.

Because all human beings have equal rights without discrimination of any kind, participation and inclusion are a key element: all people are entitled to free and active participation in governance systems in which human rights and fundamental freedoms can be realized, and states are accountable for it.

The Rights-Based Approach (RBA) integrates human rights principles, norms and standards into policies, planning, implementation and evaluation, ensuring that development programmes and projects respect the human rights framework. Key elements of the RBA embrace identifying all relevant rights claims and obligations, including collective rights; using rights principles to guide policy; assessing and monitoring processes against rights-based criteria; addressing the underlying causes of rights violations, often due to inequitable power relations; strengthening the capacity of rights holders and duty bearers to claim their rights and meet their responsibilities; taking measures to respect rights, particularly for the most vulner-able (Campese et al, 2009).


The right to communicate is a human right, however it is often circumvented and reduced to ‘freedom of expression’ which is the right of those that already have the means to express themselves. Shouldn’t the right to communicate also be part of the rights-based approach, particularly when this is the right that will allow people and communities to have a voice of their own and to participate in the decision-making process? Isn’t it quite contradictory to put human rights at the centre of development while conveniently leaving aside the right to communicate? How often do we see the right to communicate in the platforms of those organizations declaring that they are very progressive because they subscribe to or use a rights-based approach?

Voices in Development

Development is a word with future. Although tainted by multiple meanings through history, and recently criticized because it often relates to more harm than good, it still synthesizes for people a horizon of better life through social change. The word echoes desires, dreams and expectations. Because of its multiple meanings, it has been comple-mented with adjectives, for precision sake, such as ‘human development’, or ‘sustainable development’ or ‘endogenous development’.

Throughout history, two main concepts of development – and of communication – have clashed. After World War II and the Marshall Plan, development was strongly associated with economic growth (and still is). The ‘modernization’ paradigm that reigned mainly from 1945 to 1965 assumed that the origin of poverty resided in tradi-tional societies that were unable, because of their culture, to reach the level of well-being of ‘advanced’ societies. This concept of development is unidirectional and attempts to measure development quantitatively in comparison with modern societies. In terms of communication, it assumes that information dissemination is the key to knowledge creation, thus mass media plays an important role in the ‘diffusion of innovations’ that can end poverty through adopting new behaviours.

From the early 1960s, a different concept of development grew in Third World countries, particularly in Latin America, where the modernization approach was severely questioned. The ‘dependency’ theories offered a structural perspective of poverty, based on the unfair international trade relations, as well as on local inequalities and lack of social justice. In terms of communication, it analyses the unbalances in information flows, the hegemonic place of mass media from the north, particularly from the United States, and the need to develop local voices and local media to strengthen local partici-pation in the decision-making process. The MacBride report is one of the seminal contributions to this perspective (McBride, 1980). The failure of development policies from the 1970s and the clash between two approaches to communication resulted in numerous new horizontal experiences of participatory communication for social change, and the appearance of new theoretical contributions from Antonio Pasquali, Luis Ramiro Beltran and Juan Diaz Bordenave, among others.

From the 1980s on, other theoretical variants have joined the discussion, such as the ‘multiplicity’ approach (Servaes, 1989) which attaches more importance to cultural identi-ties and the global impacts of the world crisis, in all its manifestations: economic, financial,


social, etc. The study of multiple relations between the centre and the periphery, the global and the local, are key to this approach, which promotes a development concept aiming at produce structural changes, very much as the dependency theory had suggested.

Human development, adopted by the United Nations as the ruler for its progress reports, no longer focuses on quantitative aspects and economic growth alone, but attempts to provide data on other important indicators, such as equity in access to resources, sustainability of resources and institutions, knowledge creation and exchanges and participation. This fourth element is crucial to the communication approach.

The international community has the technical tools to address development chal-lenges, however technical solutions alone are often insufficient, because human beings are not pure numbers and in the real world development and social change will not be sustainable without the participation and voice of citizens. There are many lessons to be learned from practitioners and researchers, and from the theories and practices of the field of communication and other social sciences.

In its white paper Making Governance work for the Poor, the UK Department for International Development (DFID) defines good governance as not being just about government. ‘It is also about political parties, parliament, the judiciary, the media, and civil society. It is about how citizens, leaders and public institutions relate to each other in order to make change happen.’ The document points out that good governance requires three things: state capability – the extent to which leaders and government are able to get things done; responsiveness – whether public policies and institutions respond to the needs of citizens and uphold their rights; and accountability – the ability of citizens, civil society and the private sector to scrutinize public institutions and governments and hold them to account (DFID, 2006).

Even the World Bank acknowledges the importance of participatory communica-tion in governance reform, development and social change:

Communication has something unique to offer governance reform by facilitating the development of democratic practices that are not limited to the ballot box. These are practices that comprise the public surveillance of government activities, public debates within civil society regarding interlocking and often contesting interests, and publicizing social services. Communication approaches and tech-niques can be used to successfully deal with and mitigate the above-mentioned challenges. Communication links the constitutive elements of the public sphere – engaged citizenries, vibrant civil societies, plural and independent media systems, and open government institutions – and thus forms the framework for national dialogue through which informed public opinion is shaped about key issues of public concern and public policy. (World Bank, 2008).

The demand side of governance should consist in strengthening public will through participatory and deliberative approaches. Democratic engagement, central to civic-driven change, can be enabled and encouraged by public deliberation. Communities at all levels need to have the means to speak up with a collective and independent voice.

Again, too often the discourse – written by independent consultants – is well ahead of the ways things are implemented by pension-prone managers sitting in their offices. Reality shows that ‘voices’ are not really heard, and no effort is really made to amplify


them. The truth is that loud voices usually demand a saying in the decision-making process, and this is so political that most development organizations shy away, even NGOs.

On the Ground

NGOs have an enormous responsibility on the ground, because they are closer to people than large development organizations, unless they become so large that they also lose contact with reality. There are many ways to intervene in the public sphere, and NGOs need to reason why and how they want to affect the balances of power where all stakeholders meet.

In classical theory, the public sphere is the space between government and society in which private individuals exercise formal and informal control over the state: formal control through the election of governments and informal control through the pressure of public opinion. The media are central to this process. They distribute information necessary to citizens to make an informed choice at election time, they facilitate the formation of public opinion by providing an independent forum of debate and they enable people to shape the conduct of government by articulating their views. The media are thus the principle institutions of the public sphere. (Dahlgren and Sparks, 1991)

Is media enough? And then, what media and what contents? If NGOs intervene in the public sphere through mass media alone, they risk just adding messages to the information banks, without making a qualitative difference. Does society need more information dissemination to fill the gaps in the public sphere or does it need strong voices with real life stories? And then, what does it take to guarantee that voices are empowered and heard?

NGOs need to reflect on methodological and theoretical knowledge that includes communication policies and their socio-cultural impact in development; they need to promote through the media the presence of local cultures and knowledges as well as participation and citizenship for democracy; they need to support social networks through a process of appropriation of alternative community media, which means not only the management of technologies but the appropriation of the decision-making process of communication for civic-driven change. Thus the importance of the ‘third sector’ of media in development.

It is ironic that NGOs often prefer commercial media to public media and commu-nity media. The latter has proven its contribution over decades in promoting civic-driven change through participatory approaches. It easily connects communication with social processes to enhance the quality of democracy and strengthen the dialogue within the public sphere. Information products or messages are less important here than proc-esses that help to build community through communication. The process of communi-cation, rather than the messages, overflows the limits of information technologies and extends over the ensemble of social practices.

It’s not difficult to understand how vital communication is for development and social change for a more sustainable planet. The ways in which we communicate or fail


to communicate with one another are an indication of wider global problems. Failure of international bodies to alleviate conflict between and within nations is a good example of what goes wrong when communication breaks down. Missed opportunities in devel-opment, which have become so common, are a clear outcome of the failure to under-stand that effective and sustainable development is, above all, the result of a horizontal dialogue that contributes to create community.

Notes

1 http://www.comminit.com/redirect.cgi?m=5d1a07c1af1705fbb8161bbdc0d477682 Old journalism schools changed their name 40 years ago to “communication schools”, but

they are still focusing on media (press, radio, TV), not on the communication processes which are essential to develop horizontal and participatory communication. Journalism is about messages, communication is about processes. Journalists are not communicators.

References

Biekart, Kees and Alan Fowler (eds) (2008) Civic Driven Change: Citizens’ imagination in action. The Hague: Institute of Social Studies (ISS)

Campese, Jessica, Terry Sunderland, Thomas Greiber and Gonzalo Oviedo (eds) (2009) Rights-based approaches: exploring issues and opportunities for conservation. Bogor (Indonesia): CIFOR & IUCN

Dahlgren, Peter and Colin Sparks (eds) (1991) Communication and citizenship: journalism and the public sphere. London & New York: Routledge

DFID (2006) Eliminating World Poverty: Making Governance Work for the Poor, Department for International Development, London

DFID (2010) Governance, Development and Democratic Politics DFID’s work in building more effective states Good Governance available at www.DFID.gov.uk/Global-Issues/How-we-fight-Poverty/Government/Good-Governance (last accessed July 2010)

Fuglesang, Andreas (1982) About Understanding: ideas and Observations on Cross-Cultural Communication. Uppsala: The Dag Hammarskjold Foundation

Gumucio, Alfonso D. (2001) Making Waves: Stories of Participatory Communication for Social Change. New York: The Rockefeller Foundation

Hemer, Oscar and Thomas Tufte (eds) (2005) Media & Global Change. Rethinking Communica-tion for Development. Goteborg: Nordicom

MacBride, Sean (ed) (1980) Many Voices, One World. Communication and society today and tomorrow. Paris: UNESCO

Odugbemi, Sina and Thomas L. Jacobson (2008) Governance Reform under Real-World Condi-tions: Citizens, Stakeholders, and Voice. Washington: World Bank

Servaes, Jan (1989) One world, multiple cultures: a new paradigm on communication for develop-ment. Leuven: Acco

World Bank (2008) ‘Reforming Governance Systems Under Real World Conditions’ Brief for Policy Makers, Washington, DC: World Bank http://siteresources.worldbank.org/EXTGO-VACC/Resources/CommGapGovernancePolicyBrief_e.pdf (Accessed August 2010)

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