Reflections from our infomediary project

I wish to share some reflections  after almost a year of campaign implementation in Aurora:  

• As a development professional, I have validated in this campaign that there indeed is no one recipe for development. Our campaign was implemented in two sites in the same municipality but highly general recommendations are simply inappropriate, although we have the same goal: to mobilise high school students to search for information for their parents.  The contexts are just so different from each other that any one size fits all recommendations are bound to fail. This theoretical validation is very important for me, and must be considered by most development practitioners, policymakers and their cohorts.

• You have to be there. In several occasions we received advice from people, literature regarding favoured ways of doing things. Take note that I am using favoured over proper as it is fairly difficult to find that proper way of delivering development work. We can only learn so much from books, but once you are in the area you need to play it by ear. You need to consider what will work, what won’t by having a good grasp of the social realities in the community. Hence, at some point the team found it hard to follow advice from people who have not seen the area. There are no shortcuts! If you want to recommend something, you have to be there!

• There will be delays, but take note: they are a part of the game. You cannot rush things. I am pretty sure most young development communicators are eager to see change happening right infront of them. That may (most likely not) happen. It will take a lot of time before an impact is felt. There will be hints that the community is getting into the development process, but to say that significant change has happened, you’ll have to wait a bit longer.

• Be very reflective. During the course of our implementation, there were plenty of occasions when I wanted to just stop the implementation or some aspects of it. There were events that were difficult to understand from my end. And so another theoretical validation happened: not everybody subscribes to development. Or, the people in the community may have other priorities—and that we can be a noise in the social shaping going on. We need to be very reflective, lest we don’t factor in some important realizations owing to our bias—the thought that we are bringing something good and so they should take it.

• Don’t talk much. I realized much of the things that I learned in the process were due from observations when we were there. I did have observed several social phenomena that invited several questions on my part. Those observations facilitated asking more and more research questions, which made the whole experience interesting—and thrilling if you like.