Posted June 1997
by Anamaria Decock and Robert van Poelje
Food and Agricultue Organization of the United Nations
Rome, 1997
It all started in Burundi, in the early nineties. We were working in a population and family life communication project and were desperately running out of time. The project had developed an ambitious multimedia communication strategy which included the use of radio and audio-cassettes, television and video, visuals, puppet theatre as well as traditional and popular media. We had severely under-estimated the time needed to produce the communication materials we had so eagerly planned for. When it came to the production of the theatre plays, traditional songs, dances and drum shows, we realized that if we were going to work with the artist groups on an individual basis, we would have to add at least a year to the total production process. So we put them all together: 45 artists in all. In a workshop setting. There was a traditional orchestra, a women's dance group, a theatre group, a rural drum band, a popular urban kwasakwasa band. Everybody thought we were crazy. So did we.
For a week, the artists and the communication team worked together. The communicators shared their information and knowledge on reproductive health and population and development issues. The artists shared their production expertise. We were surprised to find that the sensitive population issues we had struggled with were mastered in no time. On top of that, they had no problem introducing a communication vocabulary into their daily working routine. After a couple of days, the groups were linking WHAT they wanted to say and HOW to say it, to the particular needs of specific groups of people.
But there were numerous problems. Some groups were so big we could not accommodate them all together. So we decided to work with core representatives. The risk was that, once they were back in their villages, those artists who had not participated in the workshop imposed their own ideas on those who had. This led, in many cases, to going back to their previous moralizing tones. Some urban artist groups looked down on rural instruments and many indulged in self-censorship. In an effort to please the organizers of the workshop, who were perceived as government and party officials, some artists lost their spontaneity and fell back on the usual slogans. Another problem was transportation. Faced with the difficulties of collecting the artists and facilitators every morning on time, we soon realized the importance of lodging them together in a relatively secluded environment.
When we ran a better prepared similar workshop in Malawi, we did not make the same mistakes. We made different ones. In Burundi, we had been part of a team trained in interpersonal communication skills. Arriving as guest trainers in Malawi, we assumed that those skills were already mastered by the facilitators. When, a few days into the workshop, the artists suddenly went on strike, we found out that the training of the facilitators had proved to be insufficient to guide a participatory process.
This taught us a lesson. We had underestimated the importance of attitudinal training. So we remodeled the training of facilitators, focusing more on interpersonal communication techniques to allow for the development of listening and guiding skills and the building of respect for the local cultural heritage.
Until then, we had only dealt with family life education in general, involving themes such as population and development, reproductive health and psycho-cultural barriers to adopting family planning. In the experiences that followed, we tested out the validity of the methodology with more complex issues such as population and environment and AIDS. The workshops involved project teams in Burundi, Malawi, Uganda and Guinea. They included activities with nationally renowned artists, as well as workshops at district and local levels. They embraced theatre, puppets, songs, dances, drums, storytellers, village clowns, poets, griots. The productions were used on television and rural video, radio and rural radio, in live shows to launch village campaigns and in community-based communication activities. They enveloped health workers and information officers, community workers and rural extensionists, NGOs and local traditional authorities.
When we discovered that teams of field workers in Uganda, Malawi and Guinea were continuing the process of sharing knowledge and experience with local artists, we felt we were ready to share these experiences with you. This is our truth. Not the truth.
Anamaria Decock and Robert van Poelje
Communication teams all over the world have tapped traditional resources, in various degrees of sophistication, to convince farmers how to grow better crops, persuade mothers to prepare better quality food for their children, influence traditional attitudes about family size, and change unsettling lifestyles. "Artists as experts" is a training kit recently produced by the Communication for Development Group, SDRE. It is a collection of population communication experiences, one possible approach amongst many others to produce songs, dances, theatre plays, poems and other forms of cultural expression used to communicate on a wide variety of rural development issues. It is the result of a learning process shaped by the desire to develop a carefully structured but truly participatory production process.
The tools in the kit are:
The kit costs US$50 per copy (a special 35% discount is available for customers in developing countries) and can be ordered from:
Sales and Marketing Group
Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations
Viale delle Terme di Caracalla
00100 Rome, Italy
Fax: (39-6) 5225 3152 or 5225 5155
e-mail: publications-sales@fao.org
Please specify the video standard required (PAL, Secam or NTSC) and mode of payment:
|
