The Evolution of Dev Comms with Participatory Digital Cultures and Data Technologies
The original definition of development communication was that it was a process of strategic intervention towards social change initiated by institutions and communities. Its origins go back to the post-Second World War era, when the world was divided among the Soviet blocs, the West, and the developing nations. The seed of the idea was to use human communication for the betterment of communities around the world - shift societies from a state of post-war or post-colonization poverty to a more dynamic socio-economic growth while also fostering greater individual potential. The hope with any form of development communication remains to simply use the art and science of human communication for a planned transformation of the society as a whole.
As a formal discipline, development communication emerged in the middle of the twentieth century, with the affluent West, mostly the United States of America, holding the power. The Western bloc decided to help the developing nations by introducing them to modernization and industrialization. America believed by using mass media, it could disseminate its own political and economic ideologies – liberal democracy, freedom of expression, industrialization, and capitalism – into the global south, and also use this tactic as a way to resist the Soviet model of communism. The approach was successful in several parts of the world, including India, where indeed mediums such as television, radio, print were used for social campaigns and spreading awareness regarding several pertinent issues like health, hygiene, and agriculture.
But this form of development communication was criticized for its top-down approach – its model being the experts would transmit the information and the recipient local community would simply imbibe it without any engagement or resistance. It was a model that lacked cultural nuance and ignored local social structures. With further deliberation and the advent of digital technology, it became clear that development communication needed to be updated from a model where communities were simply informed about Westernization and modernization to a model which actually engaged the recipient community in decision-making and equipped them with tools, skills, and knowledge.
The World Bank now defines development communication as the integration of strategic communication in development projects based on real community needs and contexts. Since the 1990s, development communications have evolved from depending solely on mass communication to now also making use of information communication technologies (ICT).
Previously, the disseminator of the communication was primarily the State – transmitting information on the widest networks possible, be it radio or print media. There were also smaller non-governmental organizations adding to the efforts by using mediums such as street plays, door-to-door awareness campaigns in particularly underprivileged areas, wall posters, and temporary workshops. With the advent of participatory digital cultures and data technologies, expansion of corporate social responsibility wings of business houses, and philanthropy organizations, the landscape of development communications has shifted significantly. I’ll elaborate with three examples.
Noora Health is a development organization in the health sector, that works across India, Indonesia, Bangladesh, and Nepal. Noora recognizes family members as essential caregivers and equips them with critical health knowledge and skills – both in hospitals and at home through a robust digital platform, strengthening the broader care ecosystem, eases the burden on health workers, and improves community-wide understanding of health care, recovery, and prevention. In partnership with local health systems, they first identify diseases that key drivers of morbidity and mortality. They then develop high-quality, culturally and regionally contextualized, and medically accurate multimedia material and open-access digital resources for health-skills training, which is integrated into hospitals and clinics through caregiver training sessions.
Wadhwani AI India is an independent institute that develops and deploys artificial intelligence solutions to tackle complex social challenges amongst underprivileged communities. They use the power of AI to create large-scale and equitable changes in the sectors of health, agriculture, and education. They deploy innovative AI tools for a faster and more accurate screening and diagnosis of diseases, prediction of adverse outcomes, X-ray reading, and even vulnerability mapping in communities. In agriculture, they help resolve farmer grievances through digital advisory, providing real-time support through a messaging platform with an AI chatbot. For education, they develop AI solution to enhance foundational literacy, numeracy, and classroom practices so schoolchildren can master basics, while teachers are given data-driven instructions and targeted scalable tools.
Farmers for Forests is a hybrid social enterprise that uses open-source technology to work in the space of climate change and agriculture in close partnership with rural communities. They use drone imagery, combined with satellite data to enhance their tree counts, tree health assessments, and land-use mapping with the aim to unite farmer, land, and inventory data into a real‑time view of thousands of hectares of forest land cover. With this, Farmers for Forests works towards combatting climate change’s impact on India and incentivizing farmers to protect existing and grow new forests on barren land to improve local ecology and generate income. They also use a multilingual chatbot to stay connected with the farmers, sharing updates, collecting feedback, and supporting enrollment – all through a digital tool.
Noora Health, Wadhwani AI, and Farmers for Forests are all examples of modern-day developmental communications that use an adaptable and context-specific suite of digital educational tools and training to assist their target community. Theirs is a participatory digital culture using data technologies, where the targeted community is not acting as a consumer only but works hand-in-hand with these organizations for collective development.
