April 14, 1996   BRIGHT SPOTS IN COMMUNICATION FOR DEVELOPMENT   by Everett M. Rogers Department of Communication and Development University of New Mexico Albuquerque, NM 87131-1171 (505) 277-5305     Paper presented at the Conference on Communication and Empowerment: Uses of Media and Information Technologies in Developing Countries, Los Angeles, April 11-13, 1996.       BRIGHT SPOTS IN COMMUNICATION FOR DEVELOPMENT   Everett M. Rogers*     The occasion of this Conference provides an opportunity for me to look backward, briefly, over the past 33 years that I have been involved in development communication research, teaching, and consulting. -- -   Then I will focus on identifying certain "bright spots," in which various communication technologies seem to offer a promising potential in facilitating development. I include both hardware and software technologies in this discussion, as we search for lessons learned about communication for development, with special focus on communication technology and empowerment.   LOOKING BACKWARD   In the decade or so following the end of World War II, increasing numbers of nations in Latin America, Africa, and Asia gained their independence from European colonial domination. The priority concern of these nations focused on development. These countries were poor in an economic sense, and they wanted to become more like the rich, powerful nations of Euro-America. The industrial countries, led by the United States and the Soviet Union, were locked in a Cold War, which motivated them to provide aid to developing nations in hopes of gaining allies, or at least to curry favor among the nations of Latin America, Africa, and Asia.   Initially, development was perceived mainly as a process of economic growth, to be attained via industrialization and its attendant urbanization. Hardware technology, particularly in the form of hydroelectric dams, steel and cement factories, railways, and other improved transportation, was thought to be the basic means of raising per capita incomes in developing nations. The world was optimistic about development, falsely as events worked out. While many development. successes occurred during the 1950s and 1960s, by about 1970 or so a kind of "development weariness" set in. A search for alternative routes to development began. The initial model for development was considered unsuccessful because per capita incomes did not grow much, and even when they did, the distribution of the higher incomes was often concentrated in few hands.   Questions began to be asked about the meaning or definition of development. Non-economic factors like literacy rates, infant mortality, and quality-of-life gradually received greater attention in development planning. Developing countries that pursued other than strictly capitalistic philosophies, like China, Cuba, and Tanzania took the lead in pursuing non-economic development. For example, Tanzania today has one of the highest   1 When the Cold War ended with the Fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, it was expected that the "peace dividend" (government funds that were no longer needed for military expenditures) would become available for development. But no peace dividend has become available, and the funding of development programs has generally decreased in the 1990s.   3 literacy rates in Africa (about 95 percent), although its per capita income is only about $100.   One of the important alternative conceptions of development concerned mass media communication. By 1970, radio sets were found in almost every village in developing nations, and the potential of the mass media as a "magic multiplier" for development seemed obvious. An invisible college of communication scholars over the wdrld emerged to conduct research on development communication, write books on this topic (for example, Schramm, 1964; Lerner, 1958; and Rogers, 1976), and train a cadre of graduate students to expand this academic specialty. I was an enthusiastic member of this invisible college of development communication scholars, especially during my years at Michigan State University, Stanford University, and the University of Southern California.   One of the credos of this time was that the expanding audiences for the mass media made it possible to use the media as a potential tool for development. After all, new information seemed to be at the heart of development. What better way to convey it to the mass audience in developing nations than via the media? It was realized, however, that the role of the media was mainly limited to creating awareness-knowledge of new ideas, and, perhaps, to stimulating the interpersonal communication necessary to actually change behavior.   A development success story in the use of mass communication were the numerous communication campaigns for ORT (Oral     4 Rehydration Therapy) in order to prevent infant death due to diarrhea. A young Bangladeshi medical doctor developed a simple formula consisting of one part salt (for its electrolytic effect), eight parts sugar, in a Coke bottle of pure water. These ingredients are available in most villages in developing countries, and parents were motivated when they understood that a baby sick with infectious diarrhea might die within 24 hours.. Thus the ORT campaigns which were conducted in the 1980s throughout the world represented an almost purely informational activity. These campaigns were almost universally successful, saving tremendous numbers of infant lives.2 Nevertheless many policy-makers continued to doubt the role that mass communication could play in development programs.   It was noted, on -the basis of content analyses by communication researcher~~;'~ hat the mass media in developing nations were usually dominated by commercial and advertising content, rather than by development-related content. When educational media were provided to audiences in developing nations, they paid little attention to such media, preferring instead to expose themselves to entertainment programming (including American inports).   2 Although the first ORT campaigns in Honduras and The Gambia (in which I was involved as a consultant) showed that a very few parents confused the crucial information about the oral salts, and used eight part salt and one part su~ar. The solution was to premix the ingredients and distribute them in small foil packets. This change in the ORT campaign strategy made them somewhat more dependent on infrastructural factors for their success, such as the clinics and/or pharmacies that distributed the ORT packets.     5 A further problem in the development communication era of the 1970s was how to organize the communication function in government ministries that specialized in the content areas of development: Agriculture, health, education, family planning, and industry, for example. Each such development ministry might have a communication unit within its structure, which meant that each of these several units in a country were small and weak. The ministry of information and broadcasting usually dealt mainly with the public relations function of the national government, including censorship, and had nothing to do with communication for development.   So the potential of mass communication for development was largely unfullfWlled in the 1970s and 1980s. But this potential was recognized, and efforts were made to explore new approaches.   Sustainability   During the 1960s, the Comilla Academy for Rural Development in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) was a noted success story in community development. The Comilla Academy was established with technical assistance from Michigan State University and with Ford Foundation funding. I visited Comilla in 1965, and marveled at the improvements in agricultural productivity, the increased   incomes of villagers, and the greater gender equality that was taking place throughout Comilla District.   However, when I returned to Comilla six years later, the Comilla Academy was gone, and so was evidence that a local development program had been strikingly successful among the     6 several million people of Commilla District.   This experience, and many others like it in various developing nations, led to a focussing of development communication thinking on sustainability, the degree to which a development success is self-perpetuating over a period of time. Development agencies, like the World Bank, began to use future sustainability as a criteria in deciding whether or not to fund a development project. Why initiate a project that would leave little lasting impact?   In a broader sense, this concern of the 1980s with sustainability was a recognition that development was a long-term process, andthat for a development project to have an important impact, it had to become self-sufficient. So a project's continuing dependence on external funding, or expert personnel, or sophisticated technology, or other inputs usually meant a low degree of sustainability and a lack of long-term impacts.   Empowerment   The women's movement in the United States and other industrialized countries, beginning in the late 19606, had reprocussions in the developing nations of Latin America, Africa, and Asia, culminating in the 1985 World Conference on Women, held in Nairobi, and in the 1995 Beijing Conference. Women in developing countries, particularly those living in villages and urban slums, were treated much less equally than men, compared to their counterparts in the industrialized nations. Some national governments (like India) created a ministry of women's affairs,     7 and many countries launched special programs to improve the status of women.   The measure of impact of these programs, and other programs like them for racial minorities and for rural and urban poor, is em~owerment, the degree to which an individual perecives that she or he controls her/his situation. An empowered person actively engages his/her environment, rather than passively reacting to events over which the individual feels that she/he cannot-control. During the past decade, the empowering dimension of development programs has been strongly emphasized. Such empowerment means that~a development activity should be carried Out through a process that creates a feeling of increased control on the part of the individuals expected to gain from the dev~elopment program.   The empowerment criteria of development interventions meant that the programs had to be carried out with the active participatidn of the intended audience. As Saul Alinsky (1972), the Chicago labor organizer, noted: Don't do for others what they can do for themselves. The concept of empowerment also has a foundation in Paulo Freire's (1968) consciousness-raising, the degree to which learners become aware of their oppression and are motivated to change their underdog situation. Instead of an adult literacy teacher showing a drawing of a farmer with a cow, and asking that the learners memorize the word "cow," Freire (1968) argued that the teacher should also show a drawing of a farmer with ten cows, and then ask the literacy class members why one     8 farmer has only one cow while the other farmer has ten cows. The learners not only learn the word "cow" and its plural more easily, but they also begin to question their unempowered status. Perhaps they will seek to become more empowered.   An illustration of the empowerment process is provided by an exchange between a trainer and 50 village women in Rajasthan State in India (Table 1). The trainer is an employee of the National Dairy Development Boa.~d (NDDB), a quasi-governmental organization in India that assists dairy farmers. About 85 percent of the 7 million dairy farmers in India are women, although they mostly supply labor and seldom share in the management decisions of their dairying enterprises, or of their dairy marketing cooperative. The NDDB is engaged in a massive training program (to which I am a consultant) to empower these female dairy farmers to demand the right to own the milk cows, sell their milk ~nd keep the money received, and to play a leadership role in their dairy marketing cooperative. The NDDB women's program is probably the largest empowerment program for women in the world.   Once the female dairy farmers in a village are empowered, they often form a women's club (mahila mandal). These women's clubs often organize to combat their husbands' alcohol-related behavior and to solve other social problems in their village. These women's clubs, in India and in other nations, are informal schools for empowerment.   In very recent years many development programs have shifted     9 FEMALE DAIRY FARMERS IN INDIA IN A TRAINING MEETING   Trainer: Who goes to bed last in your house?   Women: We do.   Trainer: Who gets up first?   Women: We do.   Trainer: Who works hardest?   Women: We do.   Trainer: Who feeds and cares for the milk animals?   Women: We do.   Trainer: Who milks these animals?   Women: We do.   Trainer: Who are fools?   Women: We are! their targeted audiences from the most responsive segments of the population, to the poorest of the poor, to women, to the most remote villagers, and to the most disadvantaged. And development programs are now being designed and implemented in ways that empower the participants.   The Grameen (Rural) Bank in Bangladesh consists of millions of poor and village women who could not otherwise obtain credit. even though they are often seeking only very small amounts. Professor Yunis, a professor of economics at the University of Daka, created the basic idea of the Grameen Bank in about 1980:   That poor women could obtain loans from a cooperative bank if they could get a local network of other women to guarantee their loan. The Grameen Bank spread rapidly through Bangladesh, and today there are millions of members. The Ford Foundation sent a team of evaluators to Bangladesh in the late 1980s to determine the effectiveness of this development program. The U.S. evaluators returned with so much enthusiasm for the Grameen Bank idea (98 percent of the loans are repaid) that the evaluators became champions for the idea, and there are now Grameen Banks in the Chicago slums, rural Arkansas, and in Native American villages in Alaska.   So development programs today in the developing nations emphasize sustainability and empowerment. They are in contrast with the development efforts of earlier decades.   LOOKING FORWARD: IDENTIFYING BRIGHT SPOTS   Much has changed in the developing nations of the world in     10 recent years, such as the AIDS epidemic, and many important changes have occurred in the nature of communication for development, such as the expansion of television audiences in Brazil, China, and India. Today the rate of growth in the number of television sets is expanding faster in developing countries than in the Western nations of Euro-American.   New Problems   AIDS is a very different epidemiological problem in the industrialized nations of Euro-America, where the virus is mainly transmitted by men having sex with men, than in Latin America1 Africa, and Asia, where the virus often spreads via heterosexual contact, especially by truck drivers and commercial sex workers. The impacts of HIV/AIDS are much more serious in a nation like Tanzania, where an estimated 11 percent of sexually-active adults are seropositive, that in the United states, where the comparable figure is only a fraction of a percent. And the health infrastructure of Tanzania is much less prepared to cope with the flood of people with AIDS, who need hospital and other health care.   Perhaps the salient quality of the AIDS epidemic from a communication point of view is that there is no cure for the infection. So the only effective means of coping with the epidemic is prevention, which means communication efforts to inform the public about the means of HIV transmission, and to persuade them to adopt safe sex behavior.   Another social problem in developing nations that has become     11 much more important in recent years is alcoholism. For example, when I first began working in India in the mid-1960s, 30 years ago, it was one of the most sober nations in the world. Even in Western-style hotels and restaurants in metropolitan cities like New Delhi and Bombay, it was impossible to buy a beer or a drink of Scotch, except on the one "wet" day per month. Today the alcohol situation in India is very different.   Take the example of Kohlipur District on the Northwest Coast of India, 350 miles south of Bombay. Kohlipur is the center of the "Buffalo Belt," an area of irrigated sugar cane growing and rich soils. The buffalo eat the sugar cane stalks, and their manure maintains soil fertility. The sugar cane is marketed through 16 large sugar factories in the District, each owned by a farmers' cooperative. Until the past few years, Kohlipur District was a ma~or producer ?.~ sugar. Today each of the sugar cane factories is attached to a distillery, so that almost the total production of the sugar cane is sold as rum.   One result is that alcohol-related problems have become very serious in Kohlipur District. Drunkenness and its attendant fighting and wife-abuse are commonplace in villages. Family resources are diverted from the purchase of food, clothing, children's education, etc. Liquor taxes and liquor licences are an important source of revenues for governments. Little is being done, in India or in other countries of Latin America, Africa, and Asia, about the social problem of alcohol.   New Communication Technologies     12 During the past decade, a tremendous expansion has occurred in the size of broadcasting audiences in developing nations. For example, a decade ago in India, only about 10 percent of the population had regular exposure to television. Today, this figure is about 70 percent due to more attractive programming, the satellite transmission of television programming, and to the commercialization of Doordarshan (the government television network). Since 1991, Star TV has been broadcast into India by satellite, and has become very popular.   How can this huge audience for television become a factor in deve1opment? The entertainment-education strategy consists of embedding educational messages in entertainment programs. For example, "Twende na Wakati" (Let's Go with the Times) is an entertainment-education radio soap opera broadcast in Tanzania since 1993. Our evaluation shows rather strong effects of this soap opera on family planning adoption and HIV/AIDS prevention on the part of the 55 percent of adult Tanzanians who listen. Mkwaju, a long-distance truck driver, is one of the main characters of "Twende na Wakati." He is promiscuous, a chauvinist, and alcoholic. A negative role-model for family planning and HIV/AIDS prevention, Mkwaju loses his job, contracts AIDS, and will eventually die. His wife, Tunu, is a positive role-model for family planning and for empowerment, and eventually becomes economically independent from her husband. Audience individuals identify with the positive role-models, who are rewarded in the story line, and reject the negative role-13 During the past decade, a tremendous expansion has occurred in the size of broadcasting audiences in developing nations. For example, a decade ago in India, only about 10 percent of the population had regular exposure to television. Today, this figure is about 70 percent due to more attractive programming, the satellite transmission of television programming, and to the commercialization of Doordarshan (the government television network). Since 1991, Star TV has been broadcast into India by satellite, and has become very popular.   How can this huge audience for television become a factor in deve~pment? The entertainment-education strategy consists of embedding educational messages in entertainment programs. For example, "Twende na Wakati" (Let's Go with the Times) is an entertainment-education radio soap opera broadcast in Tanzania since 1993. Our evaluation shows rather strong effects of this soap opera on family planning adoption and HIV/AIDS prevention on the part of the 55 percent of adult Tanzanians who listen. Mkwaju, a long-distance truck driver, is one of the main characters of "Twende na Wakati." He is promiscuous, a chauvinist, and alcoholic. A negative role-model for family planning and HIV/AIDS prevention, Mkwaju loses his job, contracts AIDS, and will eventually die. His wife, Tunu, is a positive role-model for family planning and for empowerment, and eventually becomes economically independent from her husband. Audience individuals identify with the positive role-models, who are rewarded in the story line, and reject the negative role-13 models, who are punished.   Entertainment-education soap operas are being broadcast on television or radio in India, China, and a number of other nations today. They have their effects on human behavior change mainly by encouraging people to talk about the educational themes.   Improved Methodologies for Evaluating Communication Effects The late 19805 and early 1990s have seen the gradual, improvement in research designs for evaluating the effects of mass communication in development. These improvementsinclude the use of multi-method triangulation, field experiments (with a control area), and interrupted time-series field experiments. For example, our evaluation of the Tanzania Project includes yearly surveys of about 3,000 respondents in the treatment area (where the radio soap opera was broadcast) and the control area, where the soap opera was not broadcast for its first two years. The control area helps eliminate the effects of other influences on family planning adoption and HIV/AIDS prevention that are occurring contemporaneously in Tannzania.   These stronger methodologies of communication research are generally of a software nature. They enable us to more precisely understand the effects of communication interventions for development.   LESSONS LEARNED     Entertainment-education soap operas are being broadcast on television or radio in India, China, and a number of other nations today. They have their effects on human behavior change mainly by encouraging people to talk about the educational themes.   Improved Methodologies for Evaluating Communication Effects The late 19805 and early 1990s have seen the gradual,   improvement in research designs for evaluating the effects of mass communication in development. These improvements include the use of multi-method triangulation, field experiments (with a control area), and interrupted time-series field experiments. For example, our evaluation of the Tanzania Project includes yearly surveys of about 3,000 respondents in the treatment area (where the radio soap opera was broadcast) and the control area, where the soap opera was not broadcast for its first two years. The control area helps eliminate the effects of other influences on family planning adoption and HIV/AIDS prevention that are occurring contemporaneously in Tannzania.   These stronger methodologies of communication research are generally of a software nature. They enable us to more precisely understand the effects of communication interventions for development.   LESSONS LEARNED   What conclusions can we draw from the experiences reviewed in this paper?     14 1. Software technologies like multi-method research, entertainment-education, the focus on empowerment and sustainability, etc. may have been more important in recent decades than hardware technologies in bringing about development.   2. Hardware technologies like satellite transmission of television programming have played a role in development that has also been important in many nations, often when these communication technologies accompany software technologies.   15 NOTES   * Rogers is Professor and Chair, Department of Communication and Journalism, University of New Mexico.     16 REFERENCES   Saul D. Alinsky (1972), Rules for Radicals: A Practical Primer for Realistic Radicals, New York, Vintage Books.   Paulo Freire (1968), Pedagogy of the OpDressed, New York1 Herder and Herder.   Daniel Lerner (1958), The Passing of Traditional Society:   Modernizing the Middle East, New York, Free Press.   Everett M. Rogers (ed.) (1976), Communication and   Development: Critical PersDectives, Newbury Park, CA, Sage.   Wilbur Schramm (1963), Mass Media and National DeveloDment, Stanford, CA, Stanford University Press.                 17