Around the time, I was developing the devcom proposal, I started publishing a newsletter from my humble office in the Fine and Performing Arts Department at Chancellor College, which was an attempt to fill up the extant need within the devcom arena, with regards to managing and sharing devcom knowledge and research. I received full support of organisations and individuals who were willing to take time from busy schedules to contribute articles and thoughts. My wife Linda was the secretary, and together, we organised postage and distribution, at the expense of reading some stories to Benjamin.
KUCHEZA CHANCELLOR COLLEGE NEWSLETTER
Issue Number 1, September 2003
Published by the Development Media Initiative, Chancellor College,
Editor: Linje Manyozo. Submissions and contacts:dmi@chanco.unima.mw; 01-524-222 x252
Welcome to the first edition of Kucheza, a
Since becoming independent,
These questions are important for consideration because the whole praxis of social development research and advocacy is grounded in what the Zambian adult educator, Derek Mulenga describes as the generalization and utilization of local or indigenous knowledge.
Kucheza therefore, provides us with a shade of a fig tree, where, whilst drinking thobwa, eating matowo or playing bawo, we will examine the place of indigenous knowledge systems in social development, so that we communicate communicatively with our own people. LM.
Zimachitika is a weekly radio drama serial focusing on food security and rural development in
Zimachitika’s popularity is grounded in its ability to feature characters and settings which both rural and urban masses identify with easily. As a participant in the pioneering work of developing the setting, characters and storylines, I want to provide a self-reflexive account of the process that led to the development of such a successful radio drama series.
Pamela Brooke, an American resident, established The Story Workshop as a private entertainment media productions company when she stopped working for the USAID-funded GABLE Social Mobilization Campaign project in the mid 1990s. In the short period she had stayed in the country, Brooke had observed the potential of maximizing the use of radio as a social development education tool.
Her dilemma was that while she had seen a lot of potential in young men and women at Chancellor College, a constituent college in the University of Malawi, in the town of Zomba (where the GABLE SMC project was initially based), there was no place for such young minds to develop their talent further.
The establishment of The Story Workshop provided a springboard for these young artists where she could help them to become professional radio drama writers and actors who would use drama for social mobilization and other rural development initiatives.
Brooke started sharing her ideas with a small group of artists from Zomba and Blantyre, a group comprising of myself (I was then lecturing Psychology at Chancellor College), Late David Kamkanda (the then a recent drama graduate), Linje Manyozo (then a third year drama student and now a development communications Lecturer in the Drama and Performance Studies Program at Chancellor College), Fletcher Ziwoya, Steve Sharra and Cecilia Hasha. This group was trimmed down to three: Olex, Dave and Linje, a team that formed the cornerstone of the earliest background work of The Story Workshop in terms of carrying out background research, developing village, settings, scenarios, characters as well as testing the storylines through participatory village drama. It was not long before organizations saw the need to find a professional media organisation for various social development campaigns. The first was UNICEF which requested the small SWET team to come up with some radio dramas for a Mother and Child Health and Nutrition Programme.
While consultations with stakeholders like the Ministry of Health, UNICEF and other NGOs generated enough technical information for the radio dramas, there was a lack of representation of the real issues being faced by that lone widow in the remotest part of
Field Research: The field research comprised of three main areas. First was research in which the team interviewed people in selected areas conducting interviews with local people to get anecdotes of ordinary Malawians as well as role models; people who had defied all odds to become successful in an impoverished society with very little opportunities on offer. The team also sought to get stories of people who had taken the bold step of going against some negative traditional norms in order to adopt positive behaviours for the betterment of their family health and development. Some areas visited were, Ntcheu, Zomba and Liwonde. The three-man team also collected stories from their home villages of
The second phase of the research took the team to offices to speak with professionals and get their perspective on health and nutrition issues. The third but also important part of the research was attaching the three men to teams of frontline officers who were working directly with the people to get first hand information of such interactions and issues that arise. Members visited clinics in rural parts of Zomba, accompanied Mobile Under five Clinic teams to remote parts of Liwonde as well as attending Adult literacy classes in the remote parts of Ntcheu.
Village Creation: The first task was to create social, cultural, economic and geographic settings in which our characters were to live, once we had created them. This created an almost geography class-like task of coming up with a suitable village full with location of houses, where each character lived, neighbouring villages and a Trading Centre and Town that economically supported the village. The village also had to have land for cultivation, where the children went to school, where the people went for treatment in case of illness, where the village buried its dead, the village water source where live stock grazed and all other details of the village. Not only were these described, but also each member had to draw a map of his village. The task of fusing all these villages into one was through focus-group discussions facilitated by Brooke herself. Ziwoya’s proposed name of Mbonekera for instance was adopted as the name of the village but was supplemented by names of rivers, surrounding villages and other social structures from imaginary villages created by Manyozo, myself and late Kamkanda.
Character Creation: After creating the imaginary village, Brooke sent the team into the field for further research on our subjects. For the late Kamkanda and Manyozo, field research extended to their daily lives as they were renting a MK200 per month house in
In the creation of the characters, Pamela Brooke led the team to give each character an age, a historical background, the way they looked, talked, dressed and who their relatives and friends were and all characteristics of a real human being. One person could come up with as many as ten to twenty characters. Characteristics on a character in Thyolo were added to one in Kasungu and a round character was developed. I cannot begin to talk of how tough it was and the frustrations leading to near quitting. The drama series’ success is a big consolation to the long working hours, heated debates and frustrations when the three of us thought nothing would materialize and yet Brooke kept her trust with us.
Creation of Zimachitika Storylines: Following, the individual efforts were yet more sessions to make a synthesis of all the numerous characters developed into a few who would be featured into the plays. Some characters had to be discarded while other two or three had to be merged into one. Few of those that stood out made it intact. Talk of Gogo Nasibeko, Nachanza, the notorious Chithope and Nabanda, they are all creations of this process. It was for instance, upon the insistence of late Kamkanda that we had Chithope. This was followed by blending of folklore, songs, and modern health and other social development messages to create the first ten Zimachitika scripts. The unique meticulous creation of life-like characters and life-like setting has enabled different writers to come and go at The Story Workshop but come up with dramas that look like they have been authored by the same person throughout the years.
Testing storylines and creation of scenarios: In November 1997, a four-person team headed by Linje Manyozo was sent to Chitenjere and Maselema villages of Malosa area to test the storylines. The Story Workshop had developed with regards to safe motherhood. This was part of the UNICEF-funded maternal and child health campaign.
The testing was executed using Brooke’s traditional media methodology in which villagers are supposed to participate in the creation, rehearsing and performing of productions affecting their lives. After the Malosa performances, Brooke organized scenario development workshops, which saw the coming in of Simon Sikwese, Jonathan Mbuna and Marvin Hanke to assist the three-man original team to develop episodes and scenarios whilst incorporating health messages. Sikwese and Hanke would later join Brooke on full-time basis.
Zimachitika has developed from featuring a UNICEF sponsored Safe Motherhood and family health program to the American Ambassador’s Fund for Human Rights and Democracy which carried messages related to Women’s participation in politics during elections. It later featured issues of Food Security with funding from the European Commission Food security Program. In addition, Zimachitika expanded to production of leaflets and comics in addition to conducting Village Drama Campaigns for HIV/AIDS Education. The Story Workshop was to later develop other drama serials and radio discussion shows.
Some of us have moved on since leaving The Story Workshop, but the experiences of working with Brooke have benefited us a lot. It must be highlighted that the first team of three Brooke had established laid solid foundations for the establishment of an organization that has outgrown Brooke herself. I however would like to commend Brooke and the subsequent authors for keeping the fires burning. OMK.
Kanthu n’khama is a 30-minute magazine radio program broadcast every Saturday afternoon from 2 o’clock on MBC Radio One. Kanthu n’khama is a short form of a vernacular proverb, ‘Kanthu n’khama phwiti anakwatira njiwa’, which literary means ‘hard work pays’. The program is produced at MBC’s Development Broadcasting Unit (DBU).
The Unit engages in development programming through participatory communication activities to promote national dialogue around development issues. Issues tackled in the broadcasts range from food security, health, HIV/AIDS, education, water. This is achieved through a network of radio listening clubs (RLCs) established across the country, by the DBU.
A radio listening club (RLC) is a group of people who are facilitating development of a wider community in which they are located. It consists of elected members of the management committee and voluntary members of the community. The radio listening clubs operate on democratic principles and membership is open to anybody in the community regardless of social status, religion, sex, age, political affiliation and tribe. The program comes under a project called Ndizathuzomwe. This is a vernacular term, which means “It is ours”. The project started in 1999 with funding from the British Department for International Development (DFID) for the first phase, which ended in 2002. Currently the Inter- Ministerial Committee on Human Rights and Democracy (IMCHRD) supports the project with funds from the United Nations Development Program (UNDP)
Kanthu n’khama is primarily produced by the RLCs, members of which have acquired basic production skills. They first identify a development issue they want to tackle through a participatory process in which different groups of people are able to make in put. This is then recorded and presented to a preferred service provider. The problem statement is called a village voice. The village voice outlines an analysis of the problem including the responsibilities of the community and the existing gaps the service provider is expected to fill. These are articulated through drama, traditional songs, poetry and discussions.
Upon listening to the village voice, the service provider agrees with the community for a possible dialogue, which takes place in the community itself. The dialogue is also recorded and facilitated by RLC members themselves but sometimes the DBU facilitators assist in moderating it. At the end of the dialogue, the RLC must always ensure that an action plan has been developed and responsibilities of both the RLC and the service provider are clearly stated in the dialogue.
The RLC then sends the village voice and the dialogue to the DBU producer who then fine-tunes and combines the segments for broadcasting as Kanthu n’khama program. The producer is aided by a program-planning sheet, which gives a guide on the key message from each of the program that is going for broadcasting.
A segment in which RLCs are reminded of how they are supposed to be managing radio listening clubs and facilitate development in their areas further spices the program.
The dialogues have taken place with various levels such as policy makers and front line staff. On the other hand service provision has come from public, private sector and civil society organizations.
The approach has empowered communities to point of summoning such high public officers as cabinet ministers to the village to account for decisions or services provided by their respective ministries. Beyond this it has helped in challenging the linear approach, which for a long time has characterized public service provision structures.
In Mulanje district for instance, a Ministry of Health’s health surveillance assistant (HSA) was asked to vacate a building which the community had constructed as an under five clinic but he had occupied it two years ago when his house was swept by floods. His moving in was meant to be a temporary measure but with time, he never bothered to get own accommodation. Twenty-four months later, the community summoned the district health officer (DHO) to raise their concern and demanded that the HSA pays them rental fees in arrears since he had been claiming his housing allowance despite not paying for his accommodation!
Being field generated, Kanthu n’khama promotes a sense of ownership of the national airwaves as it gives communities to determine program content through their chosen discourse. Much more to say that the day and time of broadcast was decided by the communities themselves! SS. Susan Sisya is a producer at DBU and is currently responsible for production of Kanthu n’khama. Contact details: E-mail dbu@mbc.org.mw; Tel 01-671-222.
In the colonial period too there were attempts to use drama for instructional purposes concerning topics colonial administrators felt were uplifting to “Native” audiences. After independence, some government institutions tried to use theatre for development communication, notably the Ministry of Agriculture through its specialized puppetry shows. M.B.C. radio drama shows, Kapalepale and Pa Majiga, also often had developmental messages as their basis.
The use of theatre workers in collaboration with Government or with NGOs for carefully organized and systematically evaluated campaigns of development communications can however, quite safely be traced to the workshop, which the Chancellor Travelling Theatre undertook at Mbalachanda Rural Growth Centre in 1982.
The organizers of that workshop were Professor Chris Kamlongera and myself, two of the founders of the Fine and Performing Arts Department (initiated 1982). Professor Kamlongera had learned much about Theatre for Development in his readings for his Doctoral Thesis, later published as a book, Theatre for Development (Zed Press,
I had already some experience of the methodology in my work with the
The Mbalachanda workshop created plays in conjunction with extension officers in the fields of Health, Literacy and Agriculture. It also generated the Chichewa version of Enoch Timpunza’s play, The Lizard’s Tail. This Chichewa production, Mchira wa Buluzi, became astonishingly popular when it was performed in
Soon other government departments and NGOs began to see the advantages of theatre’s popularity to enhance their communication methodology, especially in the rural areas. By the mid-1980s there were dozens of small groups performing plays in Chichewa and other Malawian indigenous languages, both for commercial and developmental purposes.
The theatre practitioners at
By the 1990s, especially after the change from a single-party to a multi-party political system, there was a mushrooming of NGOs in
Professor Kerr worked with the
Working in over 70 countries worldwide, Population Services International’s stated mission is “to use social marketing to deliver health products, services and information that enable low-income and other vulnerable people to lead healthier lives”. Social marketing is a process of harnessing creatively the power of the commercial sector to reach poor people. PSI employs social marketing techniques by pricing, packaging and placing its products and services so they are accessible and available to the poor and by disseminating purposefully its development communication messages trough channels that reach the poor.
PSI-Malawi’s mission statement is to improve and sustain the health of all Malawians through cost effective social marketing of needed and affordable health products and services. Its mission character is to complement the public health sector, striving for national scale, focusing on those most in need and provide a long-term presence and impact.
To achieve the above objectives, PSI-Malawi uses numerous strategies one of which is the Video Production Unit. This is part of PSI-Malawi’s communications team. Comprised of three members, two Malawians and a British volunteer it is responsible for producing videos promoting health related products in line with PSI-Malawi’s Mission Statement and Mission Character.
Equipped with three Macintosh computers, two of them being G4 digital editing workstations and digital video cameras, the crew is able to film and edit to internationally recommended levels both on and off location.
Since the equipment was purchased late last year through a Japanese grant, the Unit has made several Public Service Announcements and a 15-minute documentary on Youth Alert, which is dynamic life skills multimedia communications program that PSI-Malawi runs.
Presently, the Unit has just finished work on a 20-minute documentary entitled Ili Mu Ufa which is highlighting issues of Personal risk Perception i.e. the misconception that most people have regards HIV/AIDS that it won’t happen to them. In the documentary 6 people, 2 of them under 21 give testimony about how they became infected with HIV and how the same could happen to anybody.
The strength of the Unit lies in that trio does the all processes of video production: from pre-production to post production. For a production to occur normally a creative brief is created by a product manager who then works with the team to make a storyboard. This helps the crew decide what type of footage to collect and how it is to be presented. Throughout the process of production the product manager and PSI-Malawi’s communication team, which comprise people with different mass communication expertise, is consulted.
VPU works hand in hand with the Mobile Video Unit (MVU). This is a crew of 3 that goes to all of the country’s peri-urban and rural areas most of which have not even been exposed to video technology. There are 2 MVU teams presently one in the southern region and the other in the central, the later which cater for the north as well. The Video Production Unit working hand in hand with Mobile Video Unit has been instrumental in ensuring that health related messages have been disseminated. This has helped in filling in the gap that free government programs targeting the poorest and the fully commercial market targeting the rich.
Currently PSI-Malawi has just acquired 2 more units, which are expected to beef up the existing 2. Depending on where the shows are being conducted gatherings of up to four thousand do attend any show. The health related messages are disseminated in the evenings on big screens; Malawian music videos are used to offer entertainment before the shows actually start. In between slots, the presenters chip in and emphasize what is being seen and said. PN.
The past century has seen the rising battles of definition over what constitutes ‘authentic participation’. Notable and agreeable is that the 1960s top-down transfer of western development solutions to third world development problems was a total failure because of the conflicting cultural and socio-economic trajectories characterizing Third World societies. Then came the dependency-disassociation debates followed by the another development paradigm, characterized by African socialism projects in
“I agree entirely that there are problems in the way we are going about communication for development in places. We should however, bear in mind that nothing stands still in human life. Let us take on board the dynamism of what people are trying to do and add value to it.
“In my case, my position shifted a long time ago since the Mbalachanda days (1981). Even as we were doing the GABLE project from 1995 through 1996, questions did arise which the field could not answer nor had the time to address. We briefly touched on some of my concerns with Theatre for Development (TfD) at the moment when we chatted! These include the research component of TfD work. I do not think that it is systematic. Everything is covered in "living with the community". What does this mean? The Participatory Rural Communication Appraisal (PRCA) method […] is ideal for TfD- as a forerunner to development of sketches or plays. In fact, even Radio and Television work would benefit from this.
“Another element which TfD practitioners world over are glossing over-even your intervention- is the impact assessment that is necessary if we are to talk about success stories and if we are to be able to justify pumping more money into TfD and [other development] communication interventions. I know that this is an area that most communication or media experts do not feel comfortable with. But it is got to be done! I am now in a position to handle these two areas-let alone in placing TfD in a broader communication strategy rather than see it as a stand alone intervention mechanism.
“You will notice that I am pushing for field-based discourse. [Antonio] Gramsci and [Paulo] Freire have been pushed for quite some time now. The 70s and 80s saw a good deal of the issues you are talking about. In fact
“In my first book [Theatre for development in
“The question of outsiders versus communities or whose agenda TfD carries is critical! May be this is where we go back to PRCA! If you are developing a course in media studies, I would strongly recommend you include PRCA as one of the methodologies to be taught in the program. Chris.”
BA in Development Communication–NEW!!!
Communication and Natural Resource Management
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