Resources

Community participation in ICT-for-development (ICT4D) is sometimes portrayed as a ‘magic bullet’, which will inevitably lead to better project outcomes and the empowerment of marginalised participants from the local community. This paper takes a critical approach to participation, drawing on dual roots of participation in Development Studies and Information Systems, to consider whether apparently successful ICT4D projects, that follow best-practice for participation, are also succeeding in longer-term participant and community empowerment. The paper identifies issues and success factors relevant to participatory ICT4D and its potentially empowering role for local communities; explores the relevance of these factors to the reality of ICT4D projects in developing countries; and investigates the potential for producing an analytical framework that incorporates a project design approach that could help practitioners in the field incorporate empowerment objectives.

This first issue in the Voice for Change series is focused on members of the transgender, sex worker and homosexual communities who are often left out of the development processes because of the stigma attached to their identities.  It takes the reader through a series of narratives that are often unheard by those that frame policies and implement programmes. Why do they face discrimination? How do they cope with it? When have they succeeded and when have they failed?  It is the result of a series of engagements with these groups and attempts to amplify voices of communities on issues underlying these questions. 

This Participate report draws on the experiences and views of people living in extreme poverty and marginalisation in 107 countries. It distils messages from 84 participatory research studies published in the last seven years.

A development framework post-2015 will have legitimacy if it responds to the needs of all citizens, in particular those who are most marginalised and face ongoing exclusion from development processes. The framework has to incorporate shared global challenges and have national level ownership if it is to support meaningful change in the lives of people living in poverty.

This book provides a comprehensive framework for evaluating communication for development (C4D).  This framework combines the latest thinking from a number of fields in new ways.  It critiques dominant instrumental, accountability-based approaches to development and evaluation and offers an alternative holistic, participatory, mixed methods approach based on systems and complexity thinking and other key concepts. Maintaining a focus on power, gender and other differences and social norms, this is a framework designed to focus on achieving sustainable social change as well as continually improve and develop C4D initiatives.  This is supported by examples and case studies from action research and evaluation capacity development projects undertaken by the authors over the past 15 years.

This paper explores the idea of learning from failure in the sanitation sector. The recent trend of ‘admitting failure’ in aid and development forces sanitation practitioners, researchers and policymakers to ask if we can and should address failure more openly in order to improve our work.

The ideas in this paper developed from discussions at a workshop on ‘learning from failure’ convened by the UK Sanitation Community of Practice (SanCoP) designed to kickstart this debate. We first discuss the concept of failure itself and identify different approaches to learning from failure relating to sanitation.

These include acknowledging past failures in order to learn and adapt, and planning for ‘safe’ future failures through deliberate experimentation and innovation. We also argue that a series of further steps are required: understanding relevant previous approaches to learning from failure in the sector; recognising different types of failure; seeking different actors’ perspectives on failure; and framing the debate about failure constructively rather than negatively.

In the second part of the paper we examine different practical examples of how actors in the sanitation sector have tried to learn from failure, to assess how this happened and what changes resulted. In the final section of the paper we conclude with suggestions for how individuals and organisations working in sanitation and international development more widely can learn from failure. We also propose SanCoP itself as one example of a ‘safe space’ in which people can meet to discuss and learn from failure.

This article reports on a scoping study called Power in Community in which the author carried out Power Talks with community activists in the north of England.  She gives a comprehensive analysis of the meaning of power ranging from dominating power, to the power to co-operate, to empowerment.  She then concludes that these community activists were using non-dominating power: describing power as enabling others, sharing and listening with others.   The article argues that the evidence of practice on non-dominating power should be used to shift the debate from empowerment to transforming power.

This paper describes an approach to action research used by a group of young people in Karamoja, Uganda.  With guidance from experienced facilitators, 13 young people researched the situation of youth in their area over a period of 5 weeks in November/December 2011.  The basic principles used are set out in this paper.  Genuine attempts were made to promote people’s research into their own issues on their own terms.  This included asking questions such as who commissions and pays, how pressed everyone is for resources and time, and how ordinary people – who are not supposed to know how to do research – might suddenly take up the task with confidence and make use of facilitators without being dominated by them.  The paper emphasises the importance of rigour in action research which can appear relaxed but actually is not: it needs to be done carefully and stick to its principles like glue.  The findings of the research are published in a longer report “Strength, Creativity and Livelihoods of Karimojong Youth” which should be read alongside this paper.