Public Agenda (Accra)
Amos Safo
25 August 2008
opinion
In the past two weeks, I started a discourse on the need for the media to be used as development tools, rather than being used by their owners and politicians to pursue their personal interests. The media as has been demonstrated elsewhere in the west and Asia are part of the development agenda, as they are expected to set the agenda for national debate on pertinent economic and social issues. In many countries, the media are part of the global campaign to acquire more territory and resources. Not so in Ghana. Please read on.
Throughout most of human history the issue of development has gripped more attention than any other theoretical concept. This is so because of the need for human beings to advance from one stage to another and improve on the quality of life.
The two destructive world wars between 1914-1918 and 1931-1945 necessitated a meeting of 44 nations in New Hampshire in 1944 to reach an agreement on an institutional framework to resuscitate the world economy. Since 1944, most of the western world has seen remarkable economic, political and social development to the extent that debate on development sounds irrelevant in a western setting.
These days talk about development only evoke memories of hunger and starvation, malnutrition, lack of portable water and a scourge of diseases in the least developed countries.
The dire need for accelerated development in the 'third world' has heightened debate among western development theorists that for poor countries to make progress, they must adopt western development models. Development assistance thus grew out of the belief that newly independent and poor countries had debilitating needs that their government's alone could not provide. There was therefore the need for development assistance to these needy countries; hence the top-down development model initially imposed on needy countries (Snyder 2003).
Though most of the world agree that development means improving the living conditions of society, there has been much debate on just what constitutes improved living standards and how they should be achieved(1)
It is argued that in the early 1960s developing countries placed much emphasis on centralised development planning based on capital-intensive heavy industrialisation. Success with this old type of development paradigm was mostly measured at the national and aggregate level (Rogers 1976). Rogers further observes that development today is still less defined as a type of directed social change that provides individuals with increased control over nature.
He explains that, the fact that development programmes in various nations range from one-child family in China to computer culture in Singapore and to HIV/AIDS prevention in Mexico, Brazil and East Africa means development is still the top priority of almost every third world country. But the success or failures of development projects have largely depended on the approaches used at the national and not local levels. In the past the failure of family planning education, health and nutrition campaigns in many third world countries compelled development experts to evaluate the programmes and find out where they went wrong.
The outcome of years of evaluation and brainstorming was the realisation that no development project can ever succeed without effective communication or public participation in conceiving and implementing the ideas. Perhaps, no single concept is more deeply embedded in modern development theory than the belief that there cannot be development without communication, hence the birth of development communication.
The beneficiaries of development projects, argues Subhash Joshi have to be associated with and be fully involved in the development activity if it is to make a successful beginning and be sustainable. There is nothing new in what is being said here and yet it is something which is very often forgotten or ignored while initiating or carrying out development projects(2).
In the view of Rogers the potential role of communication in development is much greater today than ever before. He defines development communication as the application of communication to the goal of furthering development. Such application maybe be; (a) to further development generally, such as increasing mass media exposure to the people on the need to protect the environment and (b) to support a specific development programme.
Michael Kuncczik (1992) underscores the importance of communication to human life, stressing that without communication no social structure can form or endure. It is the fundamental social process permeating all aspects of social life.
For this, Rogers stresses that naturally, no one should oppose the use of communication to engineer economic and social change. What is controversial, is how to utilise communication to achieve the socially accepted development goals.
Development communication campaigns according to (Lerner 1958) began in the 1960s after an analysis in Turkey proposed that one of the key factors on the path to political development was the existence of mass media( newspapers and radio).
Following from that, Schramm (1973), a very influential communication scholar wrote a book for UNESCO on the role the mass media can play in development. By emphasising how the media can act as "magic multipliers" to spread information rapidly throughout a population Schramm's book set the stage for the growth of development communication in the 1960s. Development campaigns also drew on the diffusion of innovation framework, which recorded some success in spreading new technologies in the US and Canada.
Following Schramm's recommendations, it is now increasingly recognised that the people's active participation is an essential component for sustainable development. Any intervention with the intent of achieving sustainable development is doomed to fail unless intended beneficiaries are actively involved. See you next week for the concluding part of this article.
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