Culture and Development
7 PILLARS (Tearfund)
Country/region: Worldwide including Myanmar Ethiopia Brazil India Nigeria Burkina Faso Sudan
Project focus
PILLARS stands for Partnerships In Local Language Resources. It is an innovative approach to sharing information at grassroots level. It emphasises participatory approaches and discussion-based learning with groups of community workers e.g. churches, health, education around development themes in a set of community development guides.
6. Buddhist monks in the fight against AIDS (Save the Children UK)
Cambodia
Project focus
During 2002 SCUK started working with Buddhist monks on an advocacy programme to mobilise faith-based communities in the fight against HIV related stigma and discrimination. The project consisted of a series of three planning sessions, followed by four intensive training workshops for monks and people with HIV/AIDS. The project also produced a training kit in a traditional monk’s bag for monks to use in their communities.
The rationale for this approach is that monks are respected members of communities and in many communities pagodas are focal points of community activity. Monks can be very influential especially with community leaders and those in positions of local power. People tend to listen to what monks have to say on subjects and pay attention to what monks actually do and thus are more likely to change their views and actions as they model the monks’ behaviour.
5 Eye to Eye project (Save the Children UK)
UK
Project focus
Eye to Eye is a multi-media project which enabled fourth-generation Palestinian refugee children living in refugee camps in
4 Urunana (Health Unlimited)
Rwanda
Project focus
The focus of the Well Women Media Project (of which the Radio Soap Opera Urunana is a part), is the sustained improvement of the health of conflict-affected women in the Kinyarwanda and Kirundi-speaking areas of the
Background
The Well Women Media Project started in 1997. Urunana was launched in 1999 on the BBC Great Lakes Lifeline Service and is retransmitted on Radio
3 Stepping Stones (Actionaid)
Gambia
Project focus
Stepping Stones is a participatory HIV prevention programme based on a Freirian approach to empowerment. It combines Participatory Learning and Action techniques (PLA) such as role-play with “non-formal” education on prevention.
Background
The
2 Global Dialogues – Scenarios videos (Comic Relief)
Project focus
Scenarios From The Sahel/Scenarios From Africa is a film and video project designed to improve the lives of those infected and affected by HIV/AIDS, reduce the spread of the virus, and help local organisations develop their capacity for effective HIV/AIDS communication.
Scenarios from the
1 Adugna Community Dance Theatre and GemTV (Comic Relief)
Ethiopia
Agency: Ethiopia
Project Focus
The project was originally supported in 1997 by Comic Relief for Ethiopia Gemini Trust to provide intensive training in creative arts to a group of 30 street children (then aged 12 to 19). Eighteen of the children were trained in dance and twelve in film techniques, which has led to the establishment of the Adugna Community Theatre Dance group and the video production house GemTV in
Case Studies
The Levels Model
Towards a conceptual framework for Culture & Development
There are many different definitions of culture. Creative Exchange research found that in northern development agencies there is a tendency to equate culture with ‘arts’; in developing countries, there is a more holistic view of culture as identity and an expression of values and ways of living.
During the Routemapping Culture and Development project Creative Exchange researchers found that, when asked about a cultural approach to development, London-based development professionals responded with information about projects that had some component of “arts or culture”, “popular communications methods and/or media” or “participatory processes”. Their counterparts in developing countries referred to a more holistic “cultural approach to development” and “cultural action” - there was a stronger sense of a mutable definition of culture and the need to engage with it at different levels according to the proposed purpose of the project or activity.
What difference does culture make?
Culture engages people in different ways and projects may achieve many different outcomes which are hard to capture. For example, a single project may address awareness, personal skills, economic potential, human rights and community relations. It may enable someone to express their identity and make them feel happier. Problematic though this is to capture, it is hard to find another approach which could work in such a broad-ranging way.
This also creates some challenges for the development sector, in which there is often a ‘silo’ mentality which goes against a cultural approach which acts across different agendas simultaneously. For example, a project addressing awareness about HIV and AIDS may also address gender equality and increase participants' capacity to act and advocate for themselves.