The Drum Beat 328 - Moving Media

***

This Drum Beat is one of a series of commentary and analysis pieces. In this issue, Warren Feek, Executive Director of The Communication Initiative, outlines some examples of the impact of communication on some of the major development issues affecting the world today. What follows is Warren's perspective - NOT that of any organisation he works with or of the CI Partners collectively or individually.

We are interested in featuring a range of critical analysis commentaries of the communication for change field. These will appear regularly, usually on the first Monday of each month, and are meant to inspire dialogue throughout the month. Though we cannot guarantee to feature your commentary, as we have a limited number of issues to be published each year, if you wish to contribute please contact Deborah Heimann dheimann@comminit.com Many thanks!

***

MOVING MEDIA

This piece is an edited version of a presentation given at the "Global Forum on Media Development" in Amman, Jordon October 2005. To download a copy of the full speech as a PDF document, please click here.

by Warren Feek
Executive Director, The Communication Initiative

My aim in this piece is to help you make the "case" for your work. Be it with the communities you engage with, the people whose lives you enter and affect, the policy makers you wish to influence, or the funders you want to support your work - at some point we all need to make the "case" for media development and development communication.

I will outline here below my view of the proof that can be asserted for the impact of media development and development communication. The arguments and information have been drawn from both (a) the extensive Communication Initiative online knowledge base of more than 35,000 summaries of programme experiences, strategic thinking pieces, evaluation results and the like from all over the world and (b) the views and opinions of an interactive, online network that now numbers more than 58,000 media development and development communication professionals globally.

The Question

Like many of you must be, I am often frustrated and bewildered by how many times we are challenged to prove that media interventions and strategies have a direct effect on the core development challenges that this world faces. Funders ask. Technical experts ask. Policy makers ask. "Can you prove that the media - and other forms of communication - have impact?!"

The frustration and bewilderment are doubled when we see the flow of news emerging from the UN building as report after report and official statement after official statement describe a world generally heading in the wrong direction when it comes to "achieving" - a word used very loosely in this context - the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) by 2015! New strategies are needed. Development investment patterns need to change.

What the funders and policy makers appear to continually say they need is the detailed data and not the historical precedents (civil rights, women's suffrage, indigenous land rights, anti-apartheid movement, anti-tobacco movement, advertising for Ford or Coca Cola) - no matter how compelling and major those historical cases have been. Whether we like it or not - and no matter how strongly we believe that what we do works - measurable impact data is required. We are asked for the media development and development communication equivalent of the double blind randomised trial.

Now I do not need to tell you that this is a problem for us. We, as media development and development communication folks working on development, are in the people business, not the drug or economic modeling business. We can mumble and moan that thousands of economists, fervently believing in their apparently statistically driven economic models and theories, have contributed to the disastrous structural adjustment programmes. We can kick and scream that even with double blind, randomised trials it is still possible to get, amongst all of the good stuff, a few VIOXXes.

But we would simply be starting at the wrong place. It is clear that we need impact data from credible sources in order to convince policy makers, funders and technical experts in other disciplines. And, of course, importantly, to inform the effectiveness and efficiency of our own work.

So, what justifiable, high quality impact sound bites and key numbers can we produce?

MDG 1: Poverty

A group of London School of Economics economists were interested in the most basic of development issues, hunger and food security. In India they looked at the public distribution of food and state government expenditures on disaster relief related to the most vulnerable people and populations. Their research reveals strong, significant, and positive correlations between newspaper circulation levels and government responses: A 1% increase in newspaper circulation is associated with a 2.4% increase in public food distribution and a 5.5% increase in calamity relief expenditures.

In sum:

"States with higher levels of media development are more active in protecting vulnerable citizens".

Click here for the full summary.

MDG 2: Education

The World Bank's Policy Research Group assessed a Ugandan government-initiated newspaper campaign to boost schools' and parents' ability to monitor local officials' handling of a large school-grant programme - to ensure that the money that was allocated by government to schools got to those schools for the purpose of education - not into other people's hands through corrupt practices. The results were striking: In 1995 only 20%, on average, of the funds allocated to schools got to those schools. By 2001, with the newspaper initiative the only major variable, the situation had been reversed: 80% of the dollars get to the schools. The resources are dramatically improved for more effective education.

In sum:

Increased public access to information...reduce[s]...corruption of public funds.

Click here for the full summary.

MDG 3: Gender

Charles Westoff, a leading demographer at Princeton University, and his colleague Akinrola Bankole looked at the impact that accessing mass media had on people's reproductive health choices in Africa by using DHSS data as the basis for the analysis and controlling for the variables that could distort such findings (e.g.: income levels, socio-economic status and age).

Some examples of the data produced:

Zambia: 15% of married women with no education regularly exposed to radio and TV are currently using contraception, compared with 9% exposed to one of those media and 7% exposed to no media.

Burkina Faso: All women regularly exposed to radio, television and print media desire a mean number of children of 3.7, compared with 4.2 for women having regular exposure to two of those media, 5.7 for those exposed to one of the media, and 6.3 for those not exposed to any media.

In sum:

"[T]here is a persistent and frequently strong association between exposure to the mass media and reproductive behaviour in Africa in the expected direction;...greater knowledge and use of contraception, intention to use contraception in the future, preferences for fewer children and intention to stop child bearing. In addition, there is evidence that media exposure is also associated with later age at marriage. These conclusions are generalizable to women and men, both married and single."

What is interesting from the studies as I interpret them is that just accessing the media is enough to have a significant effect. It is not necessary to hear a specific message or piece of information. There is something about the way that the media opens up overall possibilities and horizons that transfers to, in this case, modern contraception use, fewer children and intention to stop childbearing, that encourages such change.

Click here for the full summary.

MDG 4: Child Mortality

Let us now switch continents and change issues. In 1990 The Philippines Department of Health conducted a national mass-media campaign in support of routine vaccination services. A World Health Organisation (WHO) cross-disciplinary research team assessed that media campaign. They concluded that...

"significantly attributable to that campaign"

...the proportion of fully vaccinated children aged 12-23 months increased from 54% to 65%. The proportion of children whose vaccinations were started on time increased from 43.3% to 55.6% and the number that finished on time jumped from 32.2% to 56.2%. The average number of vaccinations that a child under 2 years received increased from 4.32 to 5.10. Coverage increased between 1989 and 1990 by a factor of 0.77. Whereas 64% of mothers who knew of the campaign had their children immunised, only 42% of mothers who did not know of the campaign had their children vaccinated. The amount of these increases that were attributed to the media was 0.54.

Click here for the full summary.

MDG 5: Maternal Mortality

Researchers at the BASICS project investigated the impact of an initiative in Mali called "The Green Pendelu" which uses indigenous cultural, local media resources in Mali, including songs, singer/storytellers (griots) and traditional clothing to address maternal mortality and related issues. The goal is to increase communication between husbands and wives regarding pregnancy and to improve health-seeking behaviour during pregnancy. These goals were achieved.

All indicators showed significantly increased domestic communication between husbands and wives on a very culturally sensitive issue. And the result related to maternal mortality?

Assisted births by professional health workers in the project area increased from under 20% at the start of the project to 77% in the year after the communication intervention was implemented.

Click here for the full summary.

MDG 6: HIV/AIDS and other diseases

What do we do about HIV/AIDS? What a mess - in my view - the global international development community is in with regard to developing and managing an effective response. It will be 20 years, according to sources involved in vaccine development, before there is an effective widely available vaccine. By then who knows what situation we will be in. Perhaps the problem is that the global community IS trying to manage a global response.

One thing we can do is to incorporate much more extensively the strategic principles that guided early efforts on HIV/AIDS that proved somewhat successful. A Cambridge University publication explored this approach, finding that Uganda did much better than other countries. They found...

...evidence of a basic population level, early behaviour and communication response, initiated at community level, to avoid risk, reduce risk behaviours and care for people with AIDS. There were greater levels of communication about AIDS and people with AIDS through social networks in Uganda, unlike the comparison countries.

In Uganda, the media - national to local - were a crucial part of that locally initiated communication response. HIV prevalence declined from 21% to 9.8% from 1991 to 1998 and there was a reduction in non-regular sexual partners by 65%. The authors identified similar higher levels of communication about HIV/AIDS in other situations where HIV has declined (specifically, Thailand and the United States gay community). On that basis, why is there not much more extensive support for communities to do what they know works best in their circumstances and contexts - including this very important media response?

Click here for the full summary.

MDG 7: Environment

What a strange feeling it must be for those people involved in environmental communication to have to justify the impact of the media on environmental issues! The major fuel for the environmental fire (sorry - bad metaphor) has been local, national and international media coverage. Without the media, Greenpeace's Rainbow Warrior is just another boat.

So, it is instructive to look at what happens when there is no media and communication process integral to the overall strategy. Rather than look at the big environmental issues let's look at some basic, local environmental concerns.

The Ghana Upper Region Water Supply Project (URWSP) had repeatedly attempted to promote the use of communal waste dumps and latrines through the subsidised provision of squatting slabs, for example. These attempts "failed". Sanitation and hygiene norms, expectations and behaviours did not improve. The project began and continued as a top-down technical project...with an apparently simple solution. But the absence of a media and communication strategy and actions meant that some very basic and important questions just were not asked. This was highlighted by researchers from the Center for Development Studies in Ghana, in a paper published by The University of Bradford. Whilst the Ghana Water Supply project focused on the quality and placement of "squatting slabs" the

...absence of a media and communications strategy meant that issues like traditional use, family and household dynamics appear to have been just plain ignored.

MDG 8: Governance et al

A research paper, produced by the Poverty Reduction and Economic Management Division of The World Bank Institute, explores the link between information flows and governance, worldwide. Is the timely availability of economic data associated with better economic and political outcomes? Using two kinds of indicators, Roumeen Islam finds that "information gives power to monitor and make good choices"; thus, there is "a significant and positive correlation between transparency and improved governance". Just giving better data to people", she summarises, "can help countries do better." Of course the media is a prime vehicle for better sharing of such data and information; the media are perhaps the key actors for freedom of and freely available information and transparency.

Islam's analysis also shows that

"better decision-making in economic and political markets boosts growth", which suggests that "advising countries on the importance of...making this data widely available is policy advice that can boost economic growth."

Click here for the full summary.

Why structure our "case" around the MDGs?

As you will have noticed I have structured this presentation of examples of data demonstrating the impact of media development and development communication initiatives and processes on priority development themes around each of the MDGs. The reason for this is that - no matter what we think of the MDGs - they do provide us with two very important qualities.

First, they define impact.

Second, they are used by many major international agencies to define, orient and assess their work.

For policy influence and funding these are very important qualities.

More Data...

What I have provided here are just some examples - admittedly ones that I find particularly compelling and interesting. I hope they provide you with some 'highlights' to quote and use when engaging in policy discussions, proposing new strategies, presenting funding proposals or just, in general, talking with your colleagues in international development. For additional data, please click here.

Impact or change data is only one element - albeit a cornerstone element - of our media and communication development tool box.

However, I hope that you will feel more convinced and comfortable in responding to those who ask you if media development or development communication has impact.

Thank you. It has been an honour to share these thoughts with you. I look forward to your review.

Warren Feek Executive Director The Communication Initiative wfeek@comminit.com

***

Please contribute your comments on the above commentary by clicking here.

***

Please also participate in a Pulse Poll related to this commentary.

Having reviewed the data in The Drum Beat 328 and other impact data on The CI website, there is compelling evidence of the direct impact of development communication.

Do you agree or disagree?

***

RESULTS of past Pulse Poll

The main difference between health communication and health education or social marketing is that health communication is transdisciplinary in nature.

Agree: 50.00%
Disagree: 38.46%
Unsure: 11.54%
Number of Participants: 26

***

This issue of The Drum Beat is an opinion piece and has been written and signed by the individual writer. The views expressed herein are the perspective of the writer and are not necessarily reflective of the views or opinions of The Communication Initiative or any of The Communication Initiative Partners.

***

The Drum Beat seeks to cover the full range of communication for development activities. Inclusion of an item does not imply endorsement or support by The Partners.

Please send material for The Drum Beat to the Editor - Deborah Heimann dheimann@comminit.com

To reproduce any portion of The Drum Beat, see our policy.

To subscribe, click here.