Creating a dialogue to influence policy |
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Empowering the rural poor to communicate with and influence government | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Communities in Malawi use video as a tool to create dialogues and make their voices heard. Using video helps villagers first review their own position critically. Then, their representative can present their case at crucial meetings, reinforced by the video of statements from villagers. Through this process, communities discover new skills: researching, analysing, expressing themselves, making presentations, negotiating and team building. They become self-confident. Women speak up, even outside their communities. Spokespersons find out who to meet with, and what they need to do to become part of decision making. Villages get together to plan around common needs. And, their representatives become accustomed to reporting back. Proven in Malawi, these dialogues are now spreading to Vietnam, Ghana, and Sierra Leone. Project Ref: FRP48:
Research Programmes: Forestry Research Programme Relevant Research Projects: R6297
Project R6297 began in 1995 with a focus on rural energy and the reasons why rural people were not adopting fuel-efficient stoves in development programmes. However, this concern with the non-adoption of fuel-efficient stoves came from the 'fuelwood crisis' thinking of the 70s and 80s and whilst fuelwood is an issue in some parts of Malawi, it was found to be only one of a number of development priorities in the villages where initial (more extractive) participatory research was conducted - before the adaptation of the project (in 1996-8) to a more powerful, empowering approach. The methodology addressed the lack of accessibility to/influence over Government, and the planning process, for a largely illiterate rural population. The project developed a method for addressing this lack of influence over governmental decision-making. The method addressed the problem by helping rural villagers in Malawi to: . learn how to access government by going through the process of communicating with and addressing government representatives at different levels; and . use visual literacy - by using the audio visual tool of video with its facility for immediate replay, the approach enables rural communities first to research, and then to represent their ideas and problems to Government. This latter aspect of the process included live representation by members of local communities at a national forum, alongside their collectively produced video statements, and demonstrated the democratic process of dialogue to all concerned. The innovative methodology, developed over several decades by Dr S Braden, involves a cyclical process of building rural people's capacity to research their diverse hardships as well as their proposed solutions and to present these to Government and policy-makers, with feedback to the rest of the village. Capacity was built in two villages in Northern and Southern Malawi via the participatory communication research process (and rural energy issues explored in the first, more narrow participatory research exercise in Pansuwo Village, Nsanje District, Southern Malawi). Follow-up work in Malawi and Sierra Leone with ActionAid has allowed further evolution of this methodology. The follow-up has sustained the interaction and dialogue between villagers and with government, NGOs, etc. It has supported the formation of alliances among villages focused around their needs and facilitated villagers to review their own statements and views critically - before representing them to authorities. The methodology is cyclical because it includes reporting back by village representatives who speak at the national forum, to their village alliance members.
The initial focus of the project was on rural energy and trees, however, the participatory approach adopted could be applied to any aspect of empowering marginalised peoples to increase their voice and ultimately achieve improvements in their quality of life.
The approach employed and developed in this project, has actually been evolving over a number of years, led by Dr S. Braden. During the second half of the 1990s training projects were run with NGO personnel: Oxfam in Vietnam, Oxfam in Ghana and Uganda, as well as in Malawi (with the Ministry of Energy and Mining - R6297). The experiences of each of these projects contributed to the development of the overall methodology. It would be fruitful to explore how the different processes have progressed in practice and to analyse the barriers to the sustainable implementation and institutionalisation of such village-government dialogue. The principles underpinning the approach and the structured cyclical process itself are of the utmost importance and relevance in all spheres of international development practice, but there remain significant difficulties to overcome and resources to be acquired if such a process is to be sustainable in the long-term. The approach makes the political dimensions of development processes explicit, trying to seed and support rural social movements - something which cannot be controlled by authorities, which may not be predictable, and which suffers if not given long-term commitment. However, it is the only way to facilitate real empowerment through external intervention. In Latin America there are examples of sustained support for community participation in regional planning processes (e.g. Porto Alegre participatory resource budgeting). Certainly new thinking on rural territorial planning emerging from Latin America fits, at least on paper, with the innovative approach outlined here - because it tries to marry real community participation with more responsive institutional landscapes at the regional level (incorporating urban-rural dynamics, territorial social and spatial identities, new partnerships to deliver interlocking, demand-led services) to achieve sustained, structured democratic citizenship and influence over decision-making by poor and marginalised communities, including rural communities.
How the outputs were validated: The approach outlined here focuses on empowering those who do not have a voice - whether within the household, community or nationally, i.e. at whatever level of analysis. Unlike in the development of a specific technology, a methodology or approach that empowers the rural poor to engage with government is likely to be inherently appropriate and will as a result be validated by the rural poor that participate - as long as the process is facilitated properly. It is not easy to facilitate well - the process requires investment of resources, good facilitation skills for participatory learning and action and if employing video, then technical skills in video production/editing in the field. The difficulties of managing sensitive and high quality participatory approaches have been widely documented and is evidenced by the large number of 'participatory' approaches that end up being extractive, mechanical and even disempowering. Moreover, in conventional policy-making 'the problem is that the process of analysis and abstraction tends to marginalise communities on the one hand and fails to engage the policy makers on the other' (Holland. J, with Blackburn. J, 1998 'Whose Voice? Participatory Research and Policy Change'. IT Publications, UK). The need to change the attitudes of staff in governments and NGOs, including policy-makers and those providing front-line services has been well-documented. They need to be able to facilitate the kind of process described here, enabling rural communities to articulate and represent their visions and crucially to be able to respond appropriately - something that requires changes in thinking, resources, organisational culture etc. Enabling the rural poor to participate in dialogue with government provides opportunities for them to influence policies, to understand better how governmental policies are developed in reality and how rural people might be able to demand improvements and assistance - as well as to understand where this might not be forthcoming. This is why the methodology is applicable to any area of policy-making that might affect disempowered and marginalized groups - or wherever there are power imbalances (e.g. intra-household, intra-community, inter-community, between community and government or civil society or private sector etc) - i.e. where support is required for the disempowered to magnify their voice in a decision-making process. Staff from a range of NGOs and government departments (especially the Ministry of Energy and Mining, and the Forestry Department) formed the research team, and further support was provided by NGOs active at the grassroots in the areas where fieldwork was carried out. Where the Outputs were Validated: The approach is applicable across social groups, production and farming systems and sectors - in fact it seeks to transcend such divisions aiming to support marginalised groups to articulate their priorities and solutions - without shoehorning this into categories that external researchers might use. Indeed this is one of the reasons why NGOs and governments find it difficult to respond to the more integrated perspectives and indigenous knowledge and categories of rural people. In Malawi the R6297 project was conducted primarily in Chitimbe Village, Rumphi District in northern Malawi, and Chiling'oma Village, Thyolo District, southern Malawi. An initial participatory research exercise was also carried out in Pansuwo village, Nsanje District, southern Malawi. The Malawi ActionAid Director in 1998, Edson Musopole, who attended the project workshop in Lilongwe, was impressed with the approach adopted and the capacity that had been built amongst the villagers presenting the village videos from Chiling'oma Village. This village fell within the operational area of ActionAid and the director decided to follow up the capacity already built there by providing further support to village plans. Following the Malawi FRP project, Dr Braden approached DFID and ActionAid who jointly supported a three-year research-training programme with ActionAid staff in Malawi and Sierra Leone. Dr S Braden has also been developing this approach in other countries, e.g. Vietnam, Ghana, the UK, as well as in Malawi and Sierra Leone. Students she has trained in the Masters course - Television for Development (Southampton and Reading Universities) are also using this method worldwide. Who are the Users? As the research funding came to end there was no funding for sustaining the dialogue process, or systematically assessing impact. The initial responses of the policy-makers at the project workshop were positive - commitments were made to respond to the villagers' priorities. ActionAid staff valued the capacity created at the village level. The most obvious area of 'uptake' is in the follow-on work in Malawi and Sierra Leone (ActionAid/DFID). Individual team members are using the skills they obtained during the project and have gone on to train others. The videotapes were used in training large numbers of forestry extension staff. Much has changed in the intervening years in Malawi government policy and organisation. The National Forestry Programme (NFP), which formulated strategies through stakeholder consultation in 1998 under the Director of Forestry (who also attended the final project workshop), identifies the need for a move beyond 'fuelwood crisis' thinking and large donor investments in rural fuelwood programmes that largely failed because of: an inadequate understanding of household incentives and coping strategies; overemphasized rural fuelwood tree planting/fuel-saving technologies; overestimated people's willingness/ability to pay'. (http://www.malawi.gov.mw/Mines/Forestry/NFPStrategies%20and%20Priority%20Actions.pdf). The NFP reflects the project approach in calling for institutional change to better meet the needs of the rural poor - two-way communication between policy-making and field action to generate the knowledge/motivation to make effective changes in government and for local level action to have a strong connection to higher levels to be in tune with and influence policy, to spread lessons and scale up success. Where the outputs have been used: ActionAid and local government staff (Salima District) by 2003 assisted some 20,000 rural people to engage in a process to help them understand how they could work together and access government. The previous experience in Malawi offered a useful precedent to the ActionAid Malawi team in engaging the co-operation of government. ActionAid programme workers in Sierra Leone, learnt that local people could approach government directly and discovered that in Malawi local government is elected. Fieldwork staff have documented their own learning in both cases. David Chinyanya, Director of Planning/Development, Salima District said "There are several ways that we can bring issues onto the government agenda and one of them is exactly what this video has done to us today - it has brought issues that affect the communities onto our agenda. I believe that this is just the first stage. There should be several other stages where the issues those communities face should be brought on the agenda of government and other donors." A similar process was developed in Sierra Leone and this still has resonances in ActionAid's work. Peter Tarawaly, DFID Community Reintegration Project, Kambia said: ".if communities are properly consulted and involved in the planning process of our interventions we will cut down on our failures and increase our successes in the implementation of our projects.. our notions about communities not being able to analyse their problems and represent themselves are wrong. If this process is taken forward I believe it will solve a lot of our planning problems." Scale of Current Use: Over the longer research period afforded by the second programme in Malawi and Sierra Leone it was possible to develop the cycle of village research and representation in significant ways.Thus the first stage of representation was extended laterally, as information put together by the first village, shared and amended its findings with surrounding villages, which also entered into analliance around the findings. This process was repeated on three occasions with village clusters in the same region, until eventually a population of some 10,000 people were involved. At the second stage the cycle was also extended to include initial representation of the village alliance findings at a forum of the Executive committee of the District Assembly in Salima. This meeting and the commitments made by local government was filmed and the video was shown back to the full membership of the village alliance.Some issues supported by the village alliance and the local assembly were too costly, or too technical (a bridge and a road to give access to local markets, hospitals and schools), for the District Assembly. These issues thus had to be taken by the village alliance, accompanied by representatives of the District Assembly, to National Government in Lilongwe. Commitments made by donors and Government were recorded as an audio-visual report back to the participating villages. Meanwhile the initial village alliancehad independently extended its own membership, linking up with another similar population some distance away. By 2004 the village alliance included 20,000 people. Policy and Institutional Structures, and Key Components for Success: The methodology outlined here aims to create a platform or learning alliance in rural areas - village alliances that can engage with local and national government, NGOs the private sector etc. Thus, the main project Output is this platform itself - certainly in the follow on work undertaken in Malawi and Sierra Leone, in which more funding has been available to sustain the process of interaction. In the FRP project - R6297 - a range of NGO and government staff were involved throughout the process, but the funding for follow-up was not available. Factors in this success included the following:
Direct and Indirect Environmental Benefits: This approach provides ways of empowering the rural poor to find sustainable solutions to their problems through working together and by making demands of government. New partnerships with civil society and government with local rural alliances provide all sorts of opportunities for economic development, improved planning, achieving more demand-led, interlocking public services (e.g. extension, marketing advice, education and health, more targeted and appropriate infrastructure provision etc). Adverse Environmental Impacts: Not specifically. Coping with the Effects of Climate Change, or Risk from Natural Disasters: The challenges posed by climate change are significant and it is already exacerbating the many difficulties faced by the rural poor. Finding ways of adapting and responding to climate change and natural disasters does not require only technical solutions, but requires the rural poor to be informed of likely changes and future problems and for them to develop coordinated responses that are integrated into the planning process. Relevant Research Projects,
with links to the
|
For relevant research projects, with links to further information  Geographical regions included: Malawi, Sierra Leone,  Target Audiences for this content:Crop farmers, Livestock farmers, Fishers, Forest-dependent poor, |
