13,548 Amplifying Voice: Selections from the SBCC Summit, The Drum Beat, 757 May 30 2018

Femina Hip, Brothers for Life, Digital story-telling, Turn up the volume, Interactive radio and robust research, Video perspectives, Participatory action media, Community correspondents, Community media mashup, Community model, Critique of the draft Declaration from a voice perspective, Access more Summit presentations, Take the survey

“This conference is organized to understand better what works in shifting social norms, changing behaviors and in amplifying the voice of those who have most at stake in the success of development efforts. And it is designed to wrestle with the profound issues of social justice and agenda setting that affect these decisions. Who decides, for example, what behaviors need changing or which norms should be shifted? How can people’s realities and voices be put at the center of such change?”

Some of the presentations at the Summit with a focus on “voice” follow. You can search for others in the collection of all Summit presentations at this link.

• 1. Femina Hip – 20 Years of Amplifying Youth Voices [PDF]
  Presented by Minou Fuglesang, Femina Hip
  Femina Hip is a civil society multimedia platform in Tanzania using the edutainment approach and participatory production processes to foster youth development. Young people are nurtured into empowered change makers, who then act for the benefit of themselves, their peers, and the community. The focus is healthy lifestyles, including sex education, economic empowerment, and active citizenship. Femina creates “safe spaces” in the form of clubs that become the embryos of civil society organising. Femina’s development has led it to become an agent of “open talk”.
• 2. Positive or Negative, You Are the Same Person: The Use of Social Media to Amplify Voice and Change HIV Testing Norms in South Africa
  Presented by Brenda Goldblatt, Centre for Communication Impact (CCI)
  Brothers for Life responded to a felt need to create a space for men to talk about HIV, to normalise discussion about HIV, to answer questions, and to tell stories that address fears and barriers and elevate enabling behaviour. Centre for Communication Impact (CCI) experimented with using Facebook to meet the communication challenges and link people to services with: posts derived from a television public service announcement (PSA) with the message “negative or positive, you are the same person”, ambassador films and photos and giffs extracted from them, and illustrations created by CCI’s social media team. A CCI evaluation of 113 posts and their responses found, for example, that ambassadors’ testimonies were key, as stories made it easy for people to participate in conversations and allowed CCI to trigger discussions to address barriers.
• 3. Digital Storytelling for Change – Connecting Youth to FP INFO through Mobile Videos [PDF]
  Presented by Cori Fordham, Johns Hopkins Center for Communication Programs
  The focus is on enabling storytelling with mobile phones, especially among youth around family planning (FP), including long-acting reversible contraceptives (LARCs). Story formats can include scripted stories, testimonials, interviews/dialogues, musical performance, and entertaining stories or games. This approach involves participatory video, filmed on a mobile phone, which facilitates the exploration of an issue like youth sexual and reproductive health (SRH) by identifying local perspectives and developing solutions to issues that come up, whilst mobilising a group of champions in the process.
• 4. We Listen to the Voices of Communities…then Turn up the Volume [PDF]
  Presented by Tamsyn Seimon, In Tune for Life
  At a youth centre in Bo, Sierra Leone, a group of disenfranchised, out-of-school youth had the idea of coming together to write songs about HIV awareness. The Stigmatisation Project involved locally produced music and animation meeting local needs as identified by the communities themselves. In Tune for Life trained the youth involved on how to use the equipment and make the animations so they could understand the process and gain skills for the future. Youth didn’t just have an input – they were driving the project. Artists used came from the audiences. A study showed that the animation reached communities with HIV messaging nationally – far wider than ever expected.
• 5. Assessing the Use of Narratives and Storytelling on Family Planning Practitioners: The Family Planning Voices Initiative [PDF]
  Presented by Elizabeth Futrell, Johns Hopkins Center for Communication Programs
  The focus is on documenting and sharing real stories from people around the world who are passionate about FP. An assessment – consisting of an online survey, in-depth interviews, workshop evaluations, and content analyses – had 8 key objectives, such as articulating how telling a personal story impacted the storyteller’s attitudes and beliefs related to FP. Organisers found that storytelling approaches can be systematically measured and that storytelling approaches have the potential to: improve technical and practical knowledge, change long-held attitudes, enhance self-efficacy related to knowledge and interpersonal communication, encourage application of knowledge gained, and build a community.
• 6. What Works in Amplifying Somali Voices? Interactive Radio as a Robust Research Tool for FGM/C [PDF]
  Presented by Claudia Abreu Lopes, Africa’s Voices Foundation (AVF)
  Moved by the belief that eliminating female genital mutilation/cutting (FGM/C) can only be effective if interventions are tailored to the specific context through a granular and understanding of the collective beliefs and meaning of the practice, Africa’s Voices Foundation (AVF) deployed interactive radio programmes across a network of 27 FM radio stations covering all 3 zones of Somalia. The purpose was to gather opinions in their natural context, through a conversational mode, more aligned to the socio-cognitive processes that generate and shape beliefs and social norms. The radio programmes are designed to be inclusive and to provoke responses from a diverse and heterogeneous audience. The social norms and corresponding beliefs are made salient, challenged and negotiated through the radio discussion.

Click here and follow the instructions to access all the presentations from the Summit.

In order that the numerous Summit presentations are located and accessible as an integral part of a comprehensive platform, network, and community for this field of work, The CI will be incorporating many of them within our Groups process over the next few months. But you can access all of those submitted by presenters at this link at this time.

• 7. Integrated SBCC. Experiences Using Participatory Action Media Approaches to Design an Integrated SBC Campaign [PDF]
  Presented by Thaddeus Pennas, FHI360
  Malawi’s Health Communication for Life project illustrates Action Media, which is an interactive process that puts the audience at the centre of the strategy and material development. FHI360 asks workshop participants to think about and prioritise health issues that impact them, recognise their capacity to address health issues (including “logics” of solutions and constraints to action), understand and engage with health communication, and speak about and visualise health as they want to see it realised. Action Media is a formal qualitative research process that clarifies communication products and strategies, as the example of its use among fisherfolk to prevent HIV in Uganda shows. It moves from health communicators as outsiders to health communicators as insiders who mobilise their community to improve services.
• 8. Changing Attitudes and Perceptions of Community Correspondents: Lessons from Video Volunteers’ India UnHeard Program [PDF]
  Presented by Pooja Ichplani, Lady Irwin College, and Jessica Mayberry, Video Volunteers
  Video Volunteers (VV) is a media and human rights organisation that promotes community media and works toward providing disadvantaged communities with journalistic, critical thinking, and creative skills. The organisation’s IndiaUnheard programme is a community news service that involves local media producers engaged in media activism in a 2-step incentive model. The pan-India network of community correspondents creates impact videos, which describe the process of change and acknowledge support systems that facilitated it. VV research has sought to explore the change perceived by community correspondents in their lives and in communities due to production of participatory videos, while understanding the key aspects contributing to bringing about change in marginalised communities. Among the findings: The multipronged approach of VV’s community media model, acting as a catalyst, provides a platform and builds the capacities of marginalised community groups to centre-stage their issues, contributing to their own and their communities’ empowerment.
• 9. Amplifying Voice: The Role of Personal Stories and Participatory Media in Challenging Gender-Based Violence [PDF]
  Authored by Amy Hill, StoryCenter, and presented by Andrew Cunningham, SPRING
  “The Rain” is a story about street harassment of girls and women in Afghanistan, told through the eyes of a young woman currently living in that country. She was a participant in a workshop facilitated by StoryCenter’s Silence Speaks, which is a culture-centred initiative using SBCC strategies to connect personal stories to structural inequality in order to mobilise action. Research shows that telling and listening to stories can: increase self-esteem and wellbeing, function as information/skill-building tools, help communities bond and take action for change, and influence public policy and legislative decision-making.
• 10. Community Media Mashup: The Promise of Storytelling through Participatory Media Approaches to Catalyze Change [PDF]
  Presented by Kristina Granger, Alive & Thrive
  Community media are any form of technology-enabled media that, to varying degrees, are developed in the community, about the community, and with the community. Community media approaches build individual, community, and institutional capacity through training, sharing, and peer-to-peer networks. If communities continue developing and disseminating media beyond the intervention, the impact of the work will continue to grow.
• 11. Social Mobilization: A Community Model to Generate Health [PDF]
  Presented by Bayissa Urgesa Gurmu, Johns Hopkins Center for Communication Programs
  Ethiopia’s Communication for Health Project adopted a global social mobilisation model that integrated Communication for Social Change, injected insights from promising local practice, and used the government’s “District Transformation Plan” to trigger dialogue. Elements in the model: ownership of individuals and communities most affected, communication as empowering and horizontal, a shift from persuasion to dialogue, and outcomes beyond individual to social norms. Through dialogue during kickoffs, participants identified and acted on misconceptions and harmful practices related to cultural and gender issues. Social mobilisation kits were designed to help health extension workers (HEWs) facilitate engagement of different stakeholders. The bottom-up approach: enabled participants to articulate the changes they wish to see in their community, created a sense of ownership among the participants and set the stage for community dialogue, and enabled multiple community stakeholders to join forces to address health problems.
• 12. Critique of the draft Summit Declaration – Voice themes
  The draft Summit Declaration was shared for critique and comment. Critique from the “voice” perspective included:
  
  • * from Sohini Bhattacharya: “…SBCC amplifies the most marginalised voices and can support in ensuring that no one is left behind. SBCC embraces local arts, cultural forms of expression and context to talk about very local issues in the language which people understand…”
  • * from Catherine Karekezi: [need for] “Amplifying the voice of the voiceless especially those affected and living with different conditions…”
  • * from José Luis Aguirre Alvis: [add and stress] “We are committed to listening and learning – not only informing and messaging. Simplistic one-way messaging has failed. Horizontal communication, discussion and dialogue are central to social change; The SDGs [Sustainable Development Goals] are for everyone. We are committed to hearing and amplifying the voices of the most vulnerable in our societies, including those of children, those people with disabilities and other at-risk populations…”
  • * from Lilian Kamanzi Mugisha: “…One thing that was clearly demonstrated in the presentations depicting EE (was) the need to create a voice that brings out the pain of the voiceless in line with climate change for example nature – wildlife, environment ie water bodies, the air etc…”
  • * from Lebogang Ramafoko: [add and stress] “In order to amplify marginalised voices, we must recognise innovations/initiatives that come from indigenous organisations from the countries most affected by the problems we are trying to solve. We will do so by committing to advocate for greater resources to be spent on supporting them and to building the resilience of these indigenous organisations…”

  See more at Draft – Summit Declaration – FOR YOUR REVIEW AND COMMENT!

Full list of the CI Partners:
ANDI, BBC Media Action, Bernard van Leer Foundation, Breakthrough, Citurna TV, Fundación Imaginario, Fundación Nuevo Periodismo Iberoamericano (FNPI), Heartlines,Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health Center for Communication Programs, Maternal and Child Survival Program (MCSP), MISA, Open Society Foundations, Oxfam Novib, PAHO, The Panos Institute, Puntos de Encuentro, SAfAIDS, Sesame Workshop, Soul City, STEPS International, UNAIDS, UNICEF, Universidad de los Andes,World Health Organization (WHO), W.K. Kellogg Foundation

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.

Chair of the Partners Group: Garth Japhet, Founder, Soul City garth@heartlines.org.za

Executive Director: Warren Feek wfeek@comminit.com