What We Mean

communication for development | transformational radio | community-centred radio | the listener-learner | facilitators of community-centred radio | the five tasks of radio | landmarks for learning | health communication | health promotion

 

Definitions are often applied to a wide range of situations with a wide range of meanings and sometimes applied with little thought to context and implications. Here at hcr we use these explanations to help our focus and practice.

Communication for Development (C4D) Our working definition is based on UN General Assembly Resolution 51/172 (December 1996): "... communication systems that enable dialogue and that allow communities to speak out, express their aspirations and concerns and participate in the decisions that relate to their development”. It highlights the understanding of communication as giving a voice, facilitating participation, and fostering social change and transformation.

Transformational Radio is the specific and specialist application of radio programming to any objective that brings about positive community development and change. It supports social development and redefinition of issues in terms of health promotion goals through the tasks of informing and educating, advocacy, social learning and dialogue, and entertainment.

Community-centered Radio: Community radio is when the radio station is owned, governed, managed and operated by members of a community. We acknowledge that the owners of radio stations with a commercial licence, or radio stations owned by humanitarian, religious or NGOs or charitable organisations can dedicate their programming to community purposes. But they are not technically community radio because the radio station’s ownership, management and governance is not with the community. That is why hcr uses the term “community-centered radio”  to embrace the diversity of situations where the community genuinely participates in programming, despite the status of the radio station’s ownership, management and governance.

The Listener-learner is more than a passive listener but an agent of change as well as an object of change. Listener-learners participate in identifying, defining and changing their social, political, historical and cultural context to achieve quality of life.

Facilitators of Community-centered Radio: A partnership between community, radio station and service providers has four facilitators. (more)

Five Tasks of Radio: The onair process set off by the four community-centered radio Facilitators.

• Entertain: fun, laughter, enjoyment: music, drama, discussion, competitions etc
• Inform: tell people what is going on. News, announcements about community events or local services such as where and when
• Educate: purposive programming to increase knowledge that will lead to attitude and behaviour change (eg health, agricultural practices)
• Promote community listening and learning: usually short program features (about 6 minutes) in which people talk about their experiences or tell their stories about how they are affected or feel about community issues. Societies learn from each other through their own stories because that promotes discussion and influences how people feel; and that contributes to decision-making processes within community systems
• Advocate: in many countries it is dangerous to openly criticise authority structures and powerful vested interests. We do not recommend deep-level advocacy through investigate journalism in community-centered radio because communitystations rarely have the resources to withstand the counterattack. Advocacy is for activists who have resources and experience to tackle issues at the political level, or for investigative journalism that can manage and survive political or factional reaction and recrimination. Rather we promote “citizen’s or community-level advocacy” through promoting community-level listening and learning. All cultures and communities have their socially-acceptable ways of critiquing or challenging power structures. They all have acceptable ways of expressing how they really feel. And we tap into this community-level advocacy  with programming that empowers the community to contribute to decision-making and consensus building in ways appropriate to that community. Let people talk. They know how to do it. Let people talk to contribute to change. They know how to do it

Landmarks for Learning (or ABC of Learning Priorities) The organisation of communicational stimuli that frame learning and oral discourse. It does this in ways specific to the medium of radio, and to listener-learner communication and learning systems. In so doing it structures the movement away from hearing to the process referred to as "listener-learning".

Health Communication activities frame and disseminate information to specific audiences, to empower them to bring about change related to any objective of a health promotion campaign or aspect of the health promotion process.

Health Promotion (from Department of Health Promotion, Curtin University) There are many definitions of health promotion with some being rather complex and ambiguous. It is probably fair to conclude that there is no single definition that has universal acceptance. Hence, the following description, presented in layman language, is based on the two most widely used definitions formulated by European and North American sources (Green and Kreuter, 1999; WHO, 1986; WHO, 1997).

Health promotion can be regarded as a combination of educational, organisational, economic and political actions designed with consumer participation, to enable individuals, groups and whole communities to increase control over, and to improve their health through attitudinal, behavioural, social and environmental changes.