Agriculture/Rural Development

Each collection in the Voices of the Mountain series contains a fascinating blend of anecdote, information, history, culture, knowledge, opinion and experience with all the contradictions this may imply. These are the individual voices of the ordinary people on whose actions development depends. And they are at the heart of one of the key challenges of the next decade - how to meet national development needs without further marginalising mountain peoples. As the pace of development accelerates in mountain regions, so the social and physical environment is changing. Yet the demand for mountain riches - timber, minerals, water, tourism facilities - is more often driven by urban, lowland populations and industry than by highland communities. Mountain people are the custodians of diverse sometimes unique environments, essential to the survival of the global ecosystem. Further erosion of their ability to care for those assets will be the worlds loss, not just theirs. Panos has been working with community-based environmental, cultural and development organisations in select highland areas, training local people to record interviews on a range of issues, in order to communicate their personal experiences and understanding of the challenges ahead. The result is a wealth of material - vivid, challenging, full of human detail and variety. Voices From the Mountain Series: Oral Testimonies from Cerro de Pasco, Peru. Oral Testimonies from southwest and northeast China. Oral Testimonies from Wollo, Ethiopia. Oral Testimonies from the Lesotho Highlands. Oral Testimonies from Mount Elgon, Kenya . Oral Testimonies from the Sudety mountains, Poland. Oral Testimonies from the Himalaya (India and Nepal); the Karakorum (Pakistan); and the Sierra Norte (Mexico). Collections are published in A5-sized booklets, maps, photos, index, glossary.

The Panos Oral Testimony Programme has launched a new website which presents a collection of interviews gathered by and from communities in selected mountain and highland regions. To date more than 250 interviews have been recorded in local languages, and transcribed, translated and summarised. The testimonies come from communities in the western Himalaya of India, the Cerro de Pasco region in the Peruvian Andes, Mount Elgon in Kenya, the highlands of Ethiopia and Lesotho, Nepal, and from southwest and northeast China. Each collection is only a snapshot, and does not claim to be representative of entire mountain groups. But the range of individual voices does provide a vivid picture of highland societies, their changing physical and social environments, and their concerns for the future. The main content of the site consist of text summaries of each interview. Each summary presents a profile of the interviewee, an overview of the interview, and a detailed page by page description of the topics covered. The site also provides information about the locations where the testimonies were collected, and the partner organisations involved in the project; and the themes and concerns (with quotes) which emerge in each collection. The testimony summaries are accessible by region and by theme. It is easy, for example, to look through all the summaries in the Peru collection; or all the summaries in all collections relating to the theme of 'migration'; or all the summaries that relate both to Peru and the theme of migration. Sample themes include: changes in the environment; relations with lowland people; gender; the impact of resource extraction; traditional customs.

This title is designed for people who want to make and use pictures for development. It provides guidelines to enable non-artists to make their own visual aids such as discussion starters, picture cards, flannel boards and community maps. It includes sections on: common pictorial conventions; how to draw and use colour; how to copy and adapt pictures; how to make and use a range of people-centred visual aids; and how to plan and conduct workshops on visual communication. The book looks at ways in which visual aids have been designed and used in the past, and shows how the authoritarian approach to communication has failed to promote a more equal distribution of power among people. The author proposes a different approach to work with educational visual aids - a "people-centred" approach - which goes beyond mere participation towards fuller involvement of local people in their own development. The traditional perspective of research studies of visual literacy among non-literate people is shown to be essentially neo-colonial. In this text, by contrast, visual literacy is viewed as a skill that is easy to acquire, rather than as a handicap to overcome by outsider professionals trying to develop a top-down "pictorial language".