Battling the agenda of Communication For Development: Why the threat of being overshadowed lingers

Author: Veena, January 24 2018 - Communication For Development (C4D) is a strategy aiming at empowering communities to dialogue around prevailing problems and explore local solutions which are sustainable using various media and communication approaches. However, the subject and the professionals working in this area are under constant risk of getting overshadowed because of the nature of the work we do. C4D always works with a specific technical issue and the issue “lead” (professional) many times doesn't understand the essence of C4D which has following repercussions:

1) Challenge for C4D professionals to seek agreement on how a certain intervention could be designed.

2) For successful C4D interventions, challenge of being forgotten despite achieving results by virtue of the results being subsumed with the ambit of the larger technical program.

3) Mostly spending time in proving our efficiency.

Where is the above set of challenge coming from? According to me, it comes from the half-cooked knowledge of C4D in the minds of the people whom we work with. Oftentimes, the co-workers as well as the senior management do not understand the science of C4D and assume that it can be done by anyone including themselves. Therefore, the importance of C4D experts as such is not recognized. And since it is a strategy to enhance results for programs designed to address development issues such as Health, Nutrition, WASH, Education and Child Protection and others, it can not show results without working in close consultation with other sectors. Therefore, it is essential that those other sectors understand C4D equally well and give the subject the respect it deserves such that the thinking transforms to recognize that not anybody/everybody can do C4D work effectively, wherein there are experts who have studied the science of C4D, and they can deliver more effectively than others.

It is essential to build this enabling environment for C4D network globally for our work to attain its full potential and more community focussed programs to achieve results.

Image credit: indev jobs website

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