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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Tales From a Globalizing World

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Launched in 2002 by the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC), Tales From a Globalizing World is a collective project that brought together ten photographers from around the world to explore and illustrate selected aspects of globalisation in Asia, North America, Africa, Europe and Latin America.
Communication Strategies
By uniting diverse photographic perspectives and styles of expression, this photography project aims to explore various aspects of globalisation while creating "an image of the new reality that is shaping the world we live in." The exhibit will be toured internationally.

The exhibition begins with an exploratory trip through the Pearl River Delta in China, where Tokyo-based Swiss photographer Andreas Seibert documents the living and working conditions of migrant workers from the rural hinterland. Another Swiss, Thomas Kern, tracks signs and symptons of post 9/11 America, traveling from Detroit to the Mexican border, while Spaniard Cristina Nuñez shows, between Milan and Naples, both the glamorous and the shadowy sides of the Italian fashion industry. The portraits from Belgian Stephan Vanfleteren tell of a poverty not defined by material deprivation alone, and Shehzad Noorani, reporting on what it is like to be a child in a country where more than half the population is under 15, follows the path of children from the highlands of Nepal to the huge cities of India and his native Bangladesh. In an autobiographical account, young Bosnian Ziyo Gafic recalls the attempts to destroy a culture of ethnic coexistence, while Tim Hetherington reports from Angola, Sierra Leone and Liberia on former child soldiers discovering new values through sports. Bertien van Manen reconstructs stories about living in a foreign land while Philip Jones Griffiths covers the economic opening-up of Vietnam. Akinbode Akinbiyi, a Nigerian living in Berlin, rounds off with an essay on primitive African religions which, through the transatlantic slave trade in an earlier phase of globalisation, spread all the way from Nigeria to Brazil.

A 256-page book, also serving as a catalogue to the exhibition, was published in English, French, and German.

The Project website feautures background information about the project and the photographers, as well as a slide show of the exhibit.
Development Issues
Globalisation
Sources

Email from Drik Gallery to The Communication Initiative, September 21 2005.