When Apple founder Steve Jobs stood in front of Stanford’s students, and in front of the whole world, highlighting the necessity of staying hungry and foolish to make big changes happen, he could never have imagined that a Danish NGO would use a massive quantity of his iPods and iPhones to roll out what probably represents the largest media-for-development project ever realised in one the most inaccessible countries in the world.
Foolish.
In April, 2013, the Danish Refugee Council’s Community-Driven Recovery & Development (CDRD) Programme piloted a project in the Somali region of Hiran, delivering a system of iPods and projectors to assist with distance video training in remote, rural communities, and “foolish” was all people could say of it.
Foolish was to extend the experience to 64 rural and suburban communities, from the northern to the southernmost tip of Somalia and distributing, one year later, 64 ‘Media Kits’, including cameras, projectors and iPods/iPhones. Probably more foolish still was organising field training sessions on media technologies for 128 young Somali volunteers pre-selected, despite their level of literacy, to manage the ‘Media Kits” and organize community activities. Foolish, and ambitious, was the core idea: empowering remote areas of Somalia with media tools, and the capacity to receive, interact and produce cultural knowledge through a self-driven, civic education process.
Foolish. No doubt about it.
And yet, should it not be considered more foolish to invest time and resources in the replication of old development models, rather than working to improve their failures?
Isn’t it foolish to believe in the idea that economics and politics are enough to tie different communities together in a free-standing and stable nation?
Wouldn’t it be foolish to build a house starting with the roof?
Somalia is often addressed as the Waterloo of any development and peace-building effort; a fragmented country with no capacity to provide basic needs, or to control a storm of terrorism, religious fundamentalism, famine, destroyed infrastructure, and piracy. For more than 20 years, the international community invested military and humanitarian resources to help Somalia recover from years of war. However, plans keeps on sinking in high waters, dividing a fragile democratic government that survives on the support of foreign forces, whilst a deep-rooted clan system decentralizes the socio-political power.
Over the last 5 years, the Danish Refugee Council has been working to reduce this distance through the Community Driven Recovery and Development program (CDRD).
CDRD recognizes “societies” as the direct expression of individuals who decide to aggregate and assign themselves rules in order to address, together, specific development needs, to build a sustainable and permanent settlement. Based on this idea, the CDRD programme gives urban and rural communities in Somalia the capacity to start-up a parallel organisational structure whereby they cooperate on a larger and more democratic scale to identify and address development needs.
Although community members are initially more attracted by the possibility of accessing new financial resources, they finally find themselves involved in a unique chance to express their ideas and needs and to reconsider, along with their values, the benefit of merging their resources in larger, collaborative and more centralized social structures. In this sense, CDRD represents a unique chance for DRC to set up a laboratory of cooperation with the pillars of any state-building process: the citizens.
After years of experience, implementing and extending CDRD to a number of post-conflict countries, DRC has invested resources in evolving the programme along a more participatory and interactive direction. Trainings were identified to be vital, not just to channel the energies on a common path, but to better define the terms of cooperation in a development process driven by the beneficiaries themselves.
For these reasons, assigning full media kits to volunteers, along with the duty to autonomously carry out awareness trainings in their communities, allows DRC the opportunity to assess and support the civic capacity of cultural knowledge, norms and values that are already well-rooted in Somali societies.
Two different types of training sessions have been designed for this purpose. In both sessions, the attendants, placed in groups, are asked to design shared solutions for a series of issues occurring in a fictional community. The groups will then explain these solutions through video and photos that will be stored and shared on a virtual drive.
However, whilst half of the 64 communities involved in the programme are being provided with participatory CDRD-made video trainings on the related topics, stored on their iPods, no ready-made knowledge were inputted for the other half. Instead, they will use iPhones to conduct free research, enhancing their findings with their own culturally-bound knowledge and with the pluralism of their opinions, before agreeing on a common solution.
With no intention of sponsoring the brand, the decision to use Apple products was founded solely on their ease of use. iPods and iPhones, combined with a simple plug-in station for audiovisual projection, has made it possible for people with no technological literacy to absorb and interact with multimedia contents throughout user- friendly and instinctive interfaces.
In the same way, camcorders allow people to simply express their opinions and to convey their stories through the more familiar use of oral and visual codes. In the context of Somalia, where a radical media isolation and widespread illiteracy have empowered the propaganda of terrorist and revolutionary groups, against any kind of cooperation with both local and international institutions, the practice of expressing ideas through media tools is important to educate people in a more critical approach in assessing information and to reopen an avenue for an effective dialogue.
In 2013, during a conference in New York, the secretary of United Nations Ban Ki Moon declared:
too many well-intended development programs have failed because they did not take cultural settings into account…development has not always focused enough on people. To mobilize people, we need to understand and embrace their culture. This means encouraging dialogue, listening to individual voices, and ensuring that culture and human rights inform the new course for sustainable development”
Ban Ki Moon, 2013
At a time when communication is recognised as the core of our modern societies, “dialogue” seems to be steering the future of social development. And dialogue is eventually what DRC is trying to distribute in Somalia: a no-branded device for any community-driven approach aiming not to import, but to build new development models.
