A ciet field worker shares evidence from a study with a group of women in South Africa. Communication is essential for any development project. However, development agencies, governments, researchers and academics disagree about the purpose of communication and how to better communicate with people.
CIET understands communication as a way to bring community voices — particularly those of the most disadvantaged — into planning. As researchers, we build partnerships with communities to help them identify and solve their development challenges on their own terms and in a sustainable manner, based on a participatory search for, as well as open circulation, lay interpretation and collective discussion of, local evidence.
We call this process SEPA: socialising evidence for participatory action. However, there are certain common components that characterise the process:.
Within this context, CIET limits itself to facilitating research, communication and decision-making processes, without imposing interpretations, courses of action or ways of organizing that are foreign to existing social networks and leaderships. At all times, we promote the self-determination of communities, cultural safety, respect for dissent and solidarity between different social actors.
As the autonomous community action process gains strength, we reduce our role as facilitators, with the aim of promoting sustainable self-management beyond the intervention period.
