Participation and Poverty: Listening as a Poverty Reduction Strategy

L. Muthoni Wanyeki head of FEMNET, points out there is still a lot to be done on the use of communication as a tool for policy building - particularly when it comes to women in Africa.

The majority of Africans can neither access information on policies and programmes nor input their responses to such policies and programmes in an informed dialogue on the development process. The problem is more acute for African women, due to their higher illiteracy rates and lower access to educational opportunities. Illiteracy remains one of the key impediments to outreach efforts.

Participatory communication, effectively about the establishment of dialogue, can help resolve this challenge. The central goal is that of access to the means of communications, enabling audiences to provide their own information and to identify, analyse and overcome problems.Conversely, it enables others to understand the context of audiences so that services delivered are useful.

One recent example from East Africa underscores this. In the south of Tanzania,in Lindi, there is a centre called the Mtwara Media Center. This centre has been using participatory video with traditional fishing communities. A ban on traditional fishing practices was imposed by the Ministry responsible. And there was a decrease offish available to traditional fishers due to large scale dynamite fishing for commercial sale to urban markets and for export.

Participatory video enabled the local communities to share their experiences from one village to another. It was an eye opener and enabled them to decide to challenge the ban collectively. They decided to use participatory video to show how traditional fishing methods protect coral, fish eggs and young fish in their reef environment and compared this protection with the devastation of dynamite fishing. With the help of the media centre, they shot and edited the video and sent representatives from different villages all the way to Dar es Salaam. They managed to get an audience with the Minister. The Minister was impressed by what he saw and lifted the ban on traditional fishing practices.

This example shows us that communicating experience can validate experience and build solidarity. And by extension, organising at the local level can be successful if it is done with an awareness of national policy objectives and the context in which national policy is made.

However, there are no sustained mechanisms for the delivery of training on participatory communications. Much work has been done on training African women on the basic use of communication tools to access information. Less is done on training African women in the strategic use of the tools as a means of disseminating their own information so as to create two way, more participatory flows of information.

- L.Muthoni Wanyeki is the Executive Director of FEMNET, a communication network supporting African NGOs concerned with women's development