Development action with informed and engaged societies

After nearly 28 years, The Communication Initiative (The CI) Global is entering a new chapter. 

Following a period of transition, the global website has been transferred to the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) in South Africa, where it will be administered by the Social and Behaviour Change Communication Division. Wits' commitment to social change and justice makes it a trusted steward for The CI's legacy and future. 

On the transfer, co-founder Victoria Martin expressed her pleasure to see this work continue under Wits' leadership, knowing that co-founder Warren Feek (1953–2024) would have felt deep pride in The CI Global's Africa-led direction. 

As Wits, we honour the team and partners who sustained The CI for decades and look forward building from that strong base. This includes co-founders Warren Feek (1953-2024) and Victoria Martin as well as La Iniciativa de Comunicación (CILA), which continues independently at lainiciativadecomunicacion.com with links to The CI Global site. We are also eager to forge new partnerships and entertain new ideas as we consider how best to contribute to social and behaviour change in our rapidly evolving environment.

If you are joining the International Social and Behaviour Change Communication (SBCC) Summit in Panama, please join Wits and CILA on Monday, 22 June, to share your thoughts and suggestion for the relaunch of the Communication Initiative. We will be in Pacifica 5 from 12-1:25 for the Refuel, Reflect, and Renew Lunch Series: The Communication Initiative: celebrating a driving force for Communication for Social Change and the way forward. We will reflect on the legacy of Warren Feek and family in creating the Communication Initiative, consider the contributions of CI over the years and then turn our attention towards the future in this dynamic session. 

If you are unable to join us in Panama, we still want to hear from you. Please contribute your thoughts by following this link: https://redcap.link/CommunicationInitiative2026 or reaching out to ci_surveys@commint.com

You can also follow the QR Code:

 https://redcap.link/CommunicationInitiative2026

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Guidelines for Bloggers

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Guidelines for Bloggers

 

 

Further information about the Communication, Media, and Development Policy blog space, including links to recent blogs, can be found on the main page.

 

Our principal audience for this blog site is development policy makers and those interested in engaging with them. These include people working in donor and multilateral organisations, “mainstream” development NGOs, civil society organisations, governments, and others who inform development policy. The aim is to make media and communication for development issues relevant to development policy concerns, particularly governance concerns.

 

Blogs need to be written in a way that assumes a potentially skeptical audience, and in a way that makes few assumptions about a reader’s existing knowledge or sympathies with the arguments put forward. We are looking for clarity and a preparedness to frame issues in ways that make sense to policymakers who are unfamiliar with issues of media and communication for development.

 

Blogs need to express a viewpoint. We are not interested in announcements of existing papers or events – but instead in new ideas or opinions that stem from the ideas that are presented in existing papers, initiatives, or events.

 

The site is focused on development policy. It is not heavily focused on issues of media and communication policy (such as issues of regulation). Media policy is of interest only in relation to what ways it affects development policy.

 

Length: Between 300 and 1,500 words.

 

Quality: Blogs are not automatically accepted. Each blog submitted will be queued for review; The CI reserves the right to suggest edits from a quality perspective. Upon review, blogs will either be returned to the blogger for pursuit elsewhere or posted on the blog space.

 

Commitment: Bloggers should ideally commit to the submission of at least 4 blogs within a time span of 4 months.

 

Copyright: Blogs submitted to the Communication, Media, and Development Policy blog space must not be under review elsewhere or have appeared in any other published form.

 

Those interested in Blogging should contact wfeek@comminit.com

 

We look forward to your blogs!

 

 

 

Comments

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Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Tue, 08/18/2009 - 22:39 Permalink

congrats.
this may give more power to the strengths of professionlas like me from developing countries.

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Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Tue, 02/23/2010 - 08:27 Permalink

Dear friend,by reading the document above about blogg, i have two questions to ask you.Do you know that up till now connection in developing countries is very complicate and at some part of those country there is any cyber where people can come and work?i think that is time to connect our communities because myself i have a very big difficulties to join or reach a cyber so i would like to propose this ideas to inform you about the rural communities .Want all your support for this matter.ROGER PHOLO email:aderigas@yahoo.fr

Submitted by yeepai on Sat, 06/26/2010 - 16:25 Permalink

I guess such blog allows opportunity for reprtage of issues hardly receiving widely coverage. In most of the developing countries like PNG, the role of media as a development tool is under-estimated and sometimes news editors throw away news of development relevance because of space and time limitation to accommondate bad news as its can sells fast and attracts greater audiances.

Because most media orgnaizations in developing countries are profit-oriented, they go for bad news than good news thus depleting the development potential by massive media reportage of bad news goving a bad impression. Media organizatoons think bad news sells faster than good news.

This a big problem in media dn communication for development in developing countries.

Regards!

Peter Kinjap.