Rationale
Arguably, the most viable means for increasing communication about the needs and experiences of rural development within and between communities is rural radio. In Africa, according to the BBC World Service, there were an estimated 65 million radio receivers by the end of 1996. In contrast by the end of the 1990s, there were approximately 12 newspapers, 52 televisions, and 198 radios for every 1000 Africans (Niang, 2001). The preponderance and accessibility of radio reinforces the importance of radio in Africa. Over the past few decades in rural regions of Africa, the evolution of low-cost radio stations broadcasting from local communities has meant that many rural communities are able to gain important access to information sharing. While these rural communities may have gained access, there is, at the same time, a growing sense that the findings of researchers are not reaching those who need it most: the small-holding farmers and fishers of Africa's rural communities.
Cyber cafe on the Kumasi- Accra Road. photo: H. Hambly
Why Link?
Communication in development is fundamental to the success or failure of community development and capacity building initiatives. Recent trends have shown that communication has the potential to play an empowering, role, enabling people and societies to take control of their lives and set their own economic, political, and social agendas. Information is power, and for those who are traditionally silent or silenced, communication can be a potent tool for expressing needs, creating a voice, and realizing their own goals and desires.
Since the mid-1960s, rural radio has been recognised as having a critical role in communicating and disseminating agricultural innovation. Over the years, the context and content of agricultural radio programmes have changed. Researchers are beginning to realise that national and international public funding depends upon their ability to demonstrate how their research addresses the needs and concerns of users outside the scientific community. This realisation has in turn influenced communication in agricultural science.
Rural radio broadcasters have a mandate to meet the broadcasting needs of the communities to whom they broadcast. Part of this mandate includes providing relevant information that enables audiences to strengthen their agricultural capacities, augment their livelihoods, and achieve greater community engagement.
With research and radio mandates coming into greater alignment, broadcasters and researchers share an interest in building a two-way exchange of information with their audiences - the farmers.
Creating the Link
The experience of national and international research institutions demonstrates some of the benefits of linking research with rural radio:
- Rural radio can disseminate research findings across long distances, in languages familiar to the listening public through rural radio.
- Rural radio can reach a wide range of stakeholders including farmers, nomadic peoples, extension workers, community groups and NGOs, schools, local officials, and rural businesses.
- Radio transmits valuable information about where research projects are used and where inputs / services can be obtained.
- Radio can relay critical information such as disasters, weather, and market news.
- Radio allows researchers to share information about research projects and activities.
- Radio allows communities to share feed back about research products and activities.
The "Learning to Link" Model: Rethinking Research/Radio Linkages
Since the 1980s many of those working in the field of agricultural development began questioning the prevailing "diffusion of innovation" model of development, with its unfulfilled promises of trickled-down benefits for resource-poor rural farmers and its inherent and repressive power structures of knowledge (Roling, 2002; Long and Long, ). Rejecting top-down information diffusion , agricultural development began to seek more decentralised project planning with emphasis on creating formalized institutional linkages between agricultural scientists, extension workers, and farmers. Between 1986 and 1995, the International Service for National Agricultural Research (ISNAR) carried out various research projects related to linkages between agricultural research, extension, and producers. Early work on the concept of linkages often used the term "technology triangle" to refer to the linear linkages between farmers, extension workers, and scientists (Merrill-Sands et al., 1989). It was hoped by those involved in this shift to planned linkages that the effort would allow for greater "voice" and participation of local farmers, thereby creating a two-way flow of communication and information.
The approach that emerged was largely a "functionalist" one, positing that the real problem faced by past experience in agricultural development was a lack of collaboration and linking due to a lack of adequately planned links. The approach that ensued involved identifying linkage needs and partners, specifying linkage functions, defining linkage mechanisms, and determining resource requirements. While this approach to linkages has introduced some interruption in the power model of traditional information dissemination which typically sets scientists above both extension workers and farmers and positions farmers as passive recipients of knowledge production, it has not gone as far as has been hoped in inverting that model.
Evidence suggests that establishing linkages is not merely a matter of "getting the policy right", and that simply imposing formal lines of communication, delineating expectations, and carving out roles, by itself, does not ensure successful nor meaningful team work. The results of this approach have often been an underestimation of the inherent possibilities of partners and of the linkage itself, as well as a lack of commitment and follow-up to linkage partnerships after formal project timelines. The LARRRA project posits that, rather, lasting and empowering linkages have to be learnt, a process that involves team-building and the change of assumptions, attitudes, and behaviours towards partnership and partner stakeholders. This approach also fits well with new approaches directed to communication for social change (Gumucio Dagron, 2001).
The "learning to link" approach explored by the project provides a way to move beyond the limitations of policy-driven linkages. Learning shapes behaviour, both the behaviour of individuals and in turn, what organizational sociologists consider as the equally important cognitive dimension of organizations and institutions (DiMaggio, 1988). In this approach, it is of fundamental importance for instance, how the scientist perceives the journalist, and how by joint engagement in a process of learning there is both individual behavioural change as well as change arising within research and radio stations because of the partnership. This means that researchers, extension workers, radio broadcasters and farmers learn to link, and continue to do so not because of a well-formulated policy directive or action plan, but because they have constructed an engagement that works based on individual and shared experience.
Within a learning-centred approach, communication becomes multi-directional, complex and web-like, rather than linear, contrived, and triangular as in a planning approach. At the heart of the learning process is the transformation that occurs in participants' attitudes and behaviours towards each other, in overcoming stereotypes that debar inter-sectoral collaboration. The literature around transformative learning has taught us that dialogue, approached from a posture of learning, as a means of engaging with difference (sectoral, attitudinal) emphasizes understanding and solidarity, thereby fostering transformation of attitudes, positionalities, and relationships. Through this joint engagement, change occurs within the individual in inter-personal behaviours, within the partnership, and within the research and radio stations as a result of this partnership. This effort is extremely important given the paucity of trust characterizing present-day development institutions.
