Abstracts Publications    Contact    About    Submissions     Subscribe

Editorial, volume 8, number 1

Human beings need to communicate with each other. The French philosopher, Sartre, may have said that 'hell is other people'; but many would also say that to deprive a person of contact with others is in itself a form of torture. A child's increasing ability to articulate her thoughts and feelings, and to comprehend other people's, is as much a yardstick of her developmental progress as are the various growth-charts that plot her physical health.

Modern communication spans everything from everyday conversation to global electronic networking. Many problems derive from, and are exacerbated by, failures in this process of human intercourse; most critically, the failure to elicit, listen to, understand - and engage with - the experiences of others. Such problems are amplified when they take on major cross-cultural dimensions. This has often been seen in the cross-purpose communications between international aid agencies and their local counterparts (and even their own local staff!) as well as among Southern development organisations and the culturally diverse societies to which they belong. Vast experiential gulfs usually separate national, urban-based NGOs from the poor and oppressed communities with whom they work. Similarly, the 'lifeworlds' of Northern aid workers are light-years away from those of the sort of people on whose behalf they work - whether victims of 'ethnic cleansing', subsistence farmers, child prostitutes, or teenage mothers working in a fly-by-night garment factory. What kind of communication is possible across such divides, especially when it is mediated by inequalities in power and resources?

Since the late 1970s, a whole sub-industry has emerged among development agencies that is geared to enhancing their own listening skills. In essence, Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA) and its many derivatives are concerned with learning how to elicit reliable information from particular sets of 'ordinary people', usually within the framework of development projects in the South and, increasingly, among poor communities in the North. (1) In and of themselves, these methods guarantee nothing about how the information will be interpreted and used; but, in the hands of sensitive fieldworkers, they reduce the scope for misunderstanding, at least at the micro-level. Ideally, they also help to heighten aid agencies' awareness of the difficulties in communicating across social and cultural divides, and of the danger of (albeit unwittingly) imposing their own medium or language upon the very people to whom they seek to respond.

The risk of mistaking the 'culture of silence' for ignorance or indifference is one to which the powerful are inherently prone. Raff Carmen reminds us of this in his celebration of the life and work of Paulo Freire, the influential Brazilian educationalist who died last year. Alex Mavrocordatos gives a lively and compelling illustration of the processes that were set in train when young people in Namibia started using drama as a means to break their own silence, and to challenge the oppressive practices of the local authorities. Here, a semi-structured environment enabled the 'players' to confront hard realities in their daily lives, and to find a language through which to mobilise to change these.

International communication increasingly depends upon access to the latest technological gadgets - fax machines, PCs, satellites, modems, video cameras, and so on. Only in 1994, the director of an NGO in southern India described to me his frustration at the donor's stern refusal to approve the purchase of a photocopier, on the grounds that such a 'luxury item' had no part in the fight against poverty. Instead, he was to make do with taking triplicate carbon copies of painstakingly type-written documents, and sending a messenger to a nearby town whenever a commercial copying service was needed. His request for a portable computer and printer met with the same pious response. His irritation turned to utter contempt, however, when he visited the headquarters of this respected British NGO: not only were photocopiers freely accessible, but most staff also enjoyed the exclusive use of a sophisticated PC, complete with electronic mail, and so on. Southern practitioners were deemed, by them, not to have the same needs as Northern aid bureaucrats.

Hypocrisy aside, no-one could now maintain that the use of advanced information technology compromises an NGO's integrity. Rather, the trend is to expect instantaneous communication simply because it has become physically possible to achieve it. Speed has become a criterion, even at the expense of the quality of the communication. Even so, there is often a large gap between such technology and an NGO's capacity to use it, as emerges in Jillaine Smith's report on the World Bank-sponsored 'Global Knowledge '97 Conference'. Meanwhile, the trend of using videos in development projects is critically reviewed by Nicola Frost and Carolyn Jones. They describe their own mixed experiences in recording fairly unstructured (and sometimes intimate) events such as workshops or discussions, concluding that unless the purpose of doing so is clear, the process can be inhibiting or intrusive, while the product may be of only limited value. Like so many 'participatory' research techniques, one suspects that the medium's popularity may in part be due to its attractiveness to outsiders, rather than because it is necessarily useful to the subjects themselves.

The massive rise in electronic communication may also seduce even the most experienced development agencies into imagining that the divides of language and experience can be crossed at the click of a mouse. Such communication has dramatically changed how people interact worldwide: notions of 'community' and 'belonging' have ceased to be rooted in time and place. New opportunities are being created for groups and individuals to link local and global issues in ways that would have defied imagination even two decades ago. Witness the fact that the Zapatista leader Sub-Comandante Marcos remains undetected in the jungles of southern Mexico, and yet is in daily and high-profile communication with the outside world via the Internet!

But behind such spectacular developments lies a more disquieting reality, that of the creation of a new indicator of deprivation: information poverty. Cees Hamelink puts the electronic euphoria into perspective, arguing that since what he calls 'casino capitalism' is inherently unable to deliver equitable access to communication technologies, people's organisations face a major political and cultural challenge in ensuring that these do not, in effect, disempower them. Indeed, the Athenian democracy that is invoked by the proponents of the Global Information Infrastructure (GII) was based on the exclusion of the majority, since neither women nor slaves could belong. (2)

Gayle Gibbons, who first proposed dedicating an issue of Development in Practice to these questions, describes how the US-based International Clearinghouse on Infant Feeding and Maternal Nutrition was able to tailor information to the needs of many thousands of users in the South, delivering it to them through a range of outlets and in various ways; from simple summaries of relevant research, to translations of field reports, a series of seminar-workshops, or a website. Her theme is taken up by Julia Royall in describing the early development of the SatelLife network for health practitioners and medical researchers. These experiences show that cross-cultural interaction works, provided that needs and services are soundly matched. The choice of technology then follows, not the other way around.

This implicitly challenges the retreat into 'localism' of which PRA stands accused, or with the 'local chauvinism' form of resistance to cross-cultural exchange. Drawing on experiences in Central Argentina, Daniel M Caceres [ACCENT!] and Philip J Woodhouse maintain that what matters is the social and historical context into which a given technology is introduced, rather than whether it is indigenous to the people or region. In a similar vein, Emanuel Kasongo shows the folly of assuming that the mere spread of information technology will guarantee development. He emphasises the importance of interacting with people's own realities and social structures in resolving problems that are ultimately political and economic rather than simply technical.

Development NGOs are, by definition, in the business of cross-cultural communication, and of advocating change based on their critiques of existing structures and relations of power. Ignacio de Senillosa calls for North-South organisational forms that get beyond the one-way transfer of resources, and transcend national boundaries, while still being grounded in the fight against poverty and oppression worldwide. Hideki Moro explores the inconsistent messages arising from the fact that Northern NGOs generate funds by depicting the South as requiring their help, while also mobilising their constituencies around the need to reform Northern-dominated institutions, including aid agencies. She considers that to project negative images in order to meet short-term financial gains may undermine these same agencies' efforts (as well as their moral authority) to work for long-term change. William Postma takes a look at how NGOs establish their own values, and at how they value themselves. Like all institutions, NGOs are always in a state of flux. However, he suggests that their fixation with looking forwards and outwards (encouraged by the way in which 'strategic planning' has been applied) has led them to ignore their own core values. He advocates less concern with organigrams and charts, and more with the NGO's own cultural (and historical) coherence. Such centredness is what enables human beings and their organisations to engage openly and constructively with the outside world.

Notes:

Deborah Eade
Oxfam United Kingdom and Ireland

Previous

Abstracts Main Page

Next Abstract