Hidden

Development

A pratical working guide

to Culture and Development
for the international
development sector
Helen G. Gould, Mary Marsh 2004

Culture: Hidden Development

Helen G. Gould
Mary Marsh

Creative Exchange
2004

About Creative Exchange

Creative Exchange is a UK-based international network which specialises in public education
in the role of arts and culture in addressing social change. Creative Exchange believes that
arts and culture play a signicant role in improving quality of life of poor and disadvantaged
people and in achieving sustainable human development. Established 1998 it had grown by
2004 to a network of some 200 partners in 26 countries. Main outputs are its information
and web services, which reach more than 30,000 people worldwide, and its policy and
research activities which have addressed themes as diverse as conict, gender, human rights,
refugees and asylum seekers and culture in UK social policy. It is developing INTERCOM, an
international observatory of networks working in culture and development, and has created
the Virtual Resources Centre for Culture and Development, which is accessible on its website.
It is managed by a small London-based team of specialists and welcomes participation from
new partners and donors worldwide. To nd out more or become a partner of Creative
Exchange see our website or email info@creativexchange.org.

Funded by the UK Department for International Development (DFID)

This document is an output from a project funded by the UK Department for International
Development (DFID) for the benet of developing countries. The views expressed are not
necessarily those of the DFID.

Creative Exchange 2004

Editor Helen G. Gould
Picture research Laura Myers
Design Eugenie Dodd Typographics
Cover Image Rosa Verhoeve
ISBN 0954884108
Published by Creative Exchange
Business Ofce 1
East London Centre
64 Broadway
London E15 1NT
T +44 (0) 20 8432 0550
W www.creativexchange.org
E info@creativexchange.org

Acknowledgements
This report could not have been compiled without the co-operation of the following people:
Action Aid contacts: David Archer, Linnea Renton, Prof. S. Parasuraman, Mona Shrestha
Adhikari, Shizu Upadhya, Prabodh Dvkota, Abha Subedi, Sama Vajra Upreti, Mahendra Shakya,
Godfrey Bwandinga, Fikre Zewdie, James Kanyesigye, Kate Newman, James Nkangabwa,
Lovemore Magwere.
Comic Relief contacts: Richard Graham, Dr. Carmela Green Abate, Mesn Gebremariam, Mags
Byrne, Leah Niederstadt, Meseret Yirga, Addisu Demissie, Junaid Jemal, Mekbul Jemal,
Andualem Amare, Shiferaw Tariku, Ato Negussie Dubale, Terefwork Negussie, Tilahon Selam,
Kate Winskell, Florence Headlam, Kate Morgan.
Health Unlimited contacts: Nicky Woods, Debs McKay, Clive Nettleton, Richard Copeland,
Niamh Hanan, Kim Sokuntheary, Josephine Uwamariya, Narcisse Kalisa, Prudence
Uwabakurikiza, Vincent Gakwaya, Samuel Kyagambidwa, Sylvia Muteteli, Prosper Karenzi,
Stephen Collens.
Save the Children UK contacts: Andrew Hutchinson, Chris Williams, Michael Etherton, Mark
Capaldi, Karna Maharjan, Jasmine Rajbhandary, Lindsay Daines, Christine Patterson, Ranjan
Poudyel, Rahul Roy, Shekhar Shashadri, Jane Gregory, Peter Sykes, Catherine Fitzgibbon,
Y.Padmavathi, Dave Smith, Debra Brodie, Nguyen Hong Thanh, Anne Mulcahy, Pornpimol
Chaiboon,Ann Robins, David Wright, Ephrem Emru, Meg Brown, Rowan Jones, Ben Halls.
Tearfund contacts: Sarah Dodd, Simon Larkin, Liz Angell, Glenn Miles, Thong Romanea, Lisa
Arensen, Ngeth Sam Ouern, Kann Prorn, Kean Pros, Mourn Sophpeap, Ouch Channogun, Sam
Sary, Khem Tann, Chhiul Sakhorn, Puth Chorn, Kruel Dara, Noel Matthews, Mark Wilson, Stuart
Mullan, John Wesley Kabango, Francoise Mugorewase, Benite Nyirakirindo, Michael Gasoke,
Pasteur Gahungu Bunini, Rose Gakwandi Mukankaka, Bishop Augustine Muunabandi, Aloyse
Fashaho, John Bosco Gasangwa, Francis Davy, Ros Besford, Sophie Clarke, Rev. Dewi Hughes,
Gordon Davies, Ian Wallace.
Other contacts (ie. people not directly associated with participating agencies, their partners,
or projects funded by the agencies): Judy El-Bushra, Gordon Adam, Jenny Pearson, Rachel
Robinson, Jane Plastow, Tim Prentki, Alex Mavrocordatos, Rob Vincent, Andrew Chetley, Story
Workshop Educational Trust, Shahidul Alam, John Martin, Isabel Carter, Rosa Verhoeve, Katha,
Karna B.Maharjan, Pralhad Dhakal,Asian Regional Rights Resources Centre, Rajendra Khadka.
Thanks also to those members of our board and team who have helped edit and guide the
document to publication: David Watson, Barbara Zatlokal, Richard Graham, Laura Myers, John
Mundy, Eugenie Dodd Typographics and especially, Mary Marsh.

About the authors

Helen G. Gould (Coordinator, Creative Exchange)
Helen Gheorghiu Gould worked as a journalist, largely in the eld of arts and cultural policy, for
ten years before specialising in research and networking for Culture and Development. She was
Editor at the National Campaign for the Arts from 19961998. She founded Creative Exchange
in 1997. She was Culture and Development Consultant to the British Council from 19981999
and developed their Arts, Culture and Development strategy. She sat on the culture committee
of UK UNESCO as a specialist in Culture and Development. She contributed to UNESCOs
implementation strategy for the UNESCO Declaration on Cultural Diversity. She has written
and contributed to a number of publications on Culture and Development: The Art of Survival
(1996), Comedia; A Creative Route to Rights (1999), British Council; Culture and Social Capital,
in Recognising Culture, (2001) Comedia/UNESCO/World Bank; Culture and development v
cultural development, 2001, Culturelink; Kosovo: the creative dimension, 1999, Creative
Exchange; Creative approach to Child Rights, 2000, Creative Exchange; Creative Agendas: the
creative approach to gender equality, 2002, Creative Exchange; and Routemapping Culture and
Development (with Mary Marsh) Creative Exchange, in 2003. With Creative Exchange she
has been responsible for the development and management of several projects, including
a multi-partner project addressing the human rights of indigenous peoples in Bangladesh,
Routemapping Culture and Development, and A Sense of Belonging, researching cultural
approaches to the resettlement of refugees and asylum seekers.

Mary Marsh
Mary Marsh has over 30 years community development experience through government,
tertiary education, NGO and community level activities in Australia, UK, the Pacic,Africa and
Asia. Mary has worked to encourage participatory community-driven development addressing
unemployment, disabilities, health (mental and general, including HIV/AIDS), youth, gender,
poverty alleviation, sustainable development, environment, civil education and human rights.
As a psychology lecturer at Monash University in Australia for 13 years, Mary specialised in
community psychology, placing particular emphasis on cross-cultural and participatory
methods. Since 1995 Mary has concentrated on work in developing countries that mentors
local facilitators whose aim is to improve quality of life of mostly village people. Through the
use of participatory cultural approaches to development, Mary's work has helped strengthen
Government, NGO and community linkages and increase institutional and stakeholder
capacity to identify needs, prepare and implement action plans, and monitor and evaluate
activities that encourage local ownership of issues and their resolution.

Foreword
by Richard Graham (Head of International Grants, Comic Relief) on
behalf of the Routemapping Culture and Developent partners' group.
Boroma, Somaliland, 2003. On the outskirts of town a huge crowd practically everyone from
the town gathers to watch Circus Hargeisa. These guys are massive the S Club 7 of
Somaliland. They combine breathtaking performances with cracking skits on life in Somaliland
that include messages about HIV and AIDS, or chewing the stimulant, qat.The crowd lap it up.
Kigali, Rwanda, 2000. The Twa, an oppressed minority tribe of hunter-gatherers are trying
to get their organisation registered with the post-genocide government who have forbidden
any organisation based on ethnicity. They're frustrated and angry, but after much tenacious
negotiation, they nally succeed.
Let's state the obvious: culture is everywhere. It is dynamic, constantly shifting and changing.
Development has its own culture and engages with the culture of those it works with. Now this
is where it gets interesting. How aware are we of our own and others' culturally embedded
assumptions, attitudes and prejudices? And how does this, in turn, inuence the manner in
which development takes place?
Our gut feeling is that the relationship between culture and development is often implicit.
What we mean by that is there are a lot of assumptions made about culture whether it is
our own as development actors or that of the communities with whom we work.
The value of the Routemapping Culture and Development project has been to make the
whole issue of culture explicit. Those of us closely involved in the project have had to think
about what we mean and understand by culture, and how the projects we're involved in are
affected by and affect culture. It's not been easy, not least because describing culture is
about as easy as nailing jelly to the wall. But it's made us innitely more aware of our own
cultural baggage and more thoughtful of how development interacts with people's culture.
What do we want this report to achieve? To start with: get people to think more about the
relationship between culture and development. If that sounds too vague and wishy-washy,
try looking at some of the key questions the report raises about a development project you're
involved in, and see what comes out in the wash.
Then tell us what you found. Because we don't want this report to be a one-off.We want it to
be the start of a vibrant dialogue.With you.

Contents
08
SECTION ONE

How culture works in development

11
12
14
17

SECTION TWO

Executive summary

The historical context

What do we mean by culture?
The Levels Model:Towards a conceptual framework for culture and development
What is the role of culture in development?

Thinking culturally
21

Making culture visible

Exploring culture in key development agendas

24
26
29
32
35
37
38

Culture and social development

Culture and economic development
Culture and poverty reduction
Culture and human rights
Culture, education and participation
Culture, communications and behaviour change
Behaviour change and how it happens

SECTION THREE

Working culturally

Policy

41
41
41
42
42
44
46
47

Working culturally in development policy

48
48
49
50
51
51
52

Working culturally in development programmes and eld work

Monitoring and
evaluation

53
54
54
56
57
57
58

How to monitor and evaluate the cultural dimension

SECTION FOUR

Case studies

Practice

61
64
66
68
70
72
74

Institutional cultures
Strategic planning
Targeting resources
Allocating resources as a donor
Tearfund: exploring cultural factors in programme development
Comic Relief: cultural thinking in action
Sourcebook for working culturally in development policy
Planning, implementation and management
Partnerships
Funding and resources
Implementation
Risk assessment
Sourcebook for planning, implementation and management

Establishing indicators
Designing an evaluation framework
Agency use of evaluation data
Tracking cultural impact data
Sourcebook for monitoring, evaluation and agency use of evaluation data
What is monitoring and evaluation?
Adugna Community Dance Theatre and GemTV (Comic Relief)
Global Dialogues Scenarios videos (Comic Relief)
Stepping Stones (Actionaid)
Urunana (Health Unlimited)
Eye to Eye project (Save the Children UK)
Buddhist monks in the ght against AIDS (Save the Children UK)
Pillars (Tearfund)

Appendices
77
78

References/bibliography
About Routemapping Culture and Development

Adugna community dance

theatre in action in their
Adugna Potentials project in
Ethiopia. Rosa Verhoeve 2003.

Executive summary
Culture: Hidden Development has evolved from a research project by Creative Exchange,
known as Routemapping Culture and Development. This independent pilot research project
was funded by the UK Governments Department for International Development (DFID) and
was carried out between October 2002 and November 2003. It explored the role of culture in
the work of ve UK-based international development agencies Actionaid, Comic Relief,
Health Unlimited, Save the Children UK and Tearfund.
The project was the rst of its kind to attempt to track and map the role of culture in the
development sector, and it sought to understand how culture tted in to development policy and
eld work. The research was graded as successful by independent assessors and further funding
was granted by DFID to produce Culture:Hidden Development as a follow-up publication.
The full results of the Routemapping Research can be found on page 78.
In summary, the Routemapping research found 350 examples of cultural projects in 40 countries taking place over a 2-year-period, with a conservative cost base of 30 million. As
no cultural key words were available on development agency databases, these projects
were tracked through a process of snowball sampling through corporate memory, and so
represented the tip of an iceberg of unknown proportions insofar as it was an incomplete
sample of all available data and cultural projects in the ve partner agencies.
The research revealed the different notions of culture which were apparent in development
agency thinking ranging from culture as a social environment (or context), to culture as a
method of development communication.This was the rst attempt at a conceptual framework
for culture and development and has been further developed in this publication (see page 14).
One of the key ndings from the research was the invisibility of culture within development
policy. Though the research found a substantial level of investment and commitment to
cultural projects by the ve agencies involved, and showed that cultural thinking was
embedded in their practice, there was limited explicit policy and guidance on culture, and
very little evidence of strategic thinking or impact analysis of this area of their work.
The research report called for the development sector to acknowledge that culture was a
powerful aspect of social transformation and to recognise that it was one in which it is
already engaged and investing. Universal one-size-ts-all approaches to development
failed to take into account complex local cultural specics: cultural assessment now needed
to be part of country and project planning.

development agencies did not demonstrate how they were considering cultural impacts and
therefore had no system of ensuring their work was culturally sensitive and respected cultural
rights and diversity;

there was no impetus to evaluate the majority of cultural projects to establish how they
affected beneciaries, as such there was no system of quality control;

without policy recognition there was no incentive to collect data so that the role of culture
could become more visible.
It argued that the current invisibility of culture within policy created a vicious circle:
1 The development sector must have a greater level of understanding of, and more information
and evidence about, how and why culture has an impact on development issues.
2 Although the development sector may recognise that culture is already embedded in
development, it is largely invisible and requires greater acknowledgement and consideration
in development thinking.
3 On a practical level, there is a need for better monitoring and evaluation; improved analysis of
the impact of cultural projects on development objectives as well as analysis of development
activities on cultural issues; an improvement in management and delivery, and better guidance
and governance of cultural issues and projects within development eldwork closer attention needs to be paid to what cultural projects are delivering, and how development projects
are impacting on cultural issues.

The research also warned that, without adequate background thinking or evaluation, current
trends in using cultural methods for behaviour change and communications programmes ran
the risk of using the culture of poor and marginalised communities manipulatively, and of
opening up agencies to risk through a failure to adequately monitor work in the eld.
These ndings implied three main courses of action:
This publication is designed as a rst step towards teasing out some of these issues and
helping the development sector to start thinking culturally and taking practical steps towards
acknowledging the cultural dimension of their work.
The following sections address these issues:
How Culture Works in Development traces the history and background of the role of culture in
development, explores denitions of culture and proposes a new conceptual framework.
Thinking Culturally explores the issue of the visibility of culture; it explores the relationship
between culture and some primary development agendas social development, economic
growth, poverty, rights, education and communications.At each stage it includes questions to
challenge thinking.
Working Culturally explores practical ways of building culture into policy thinking and
programme delivery, addresses evaluation and signposts resource materials.

Indigenous children in Chittagong

Hill Tracts, Bangladesh, playing a
traditional game. Creative
Exchange/Susanna Wilford 1999.

SECTION ONE

How culture works in

development
Traces the history and background of the role
of culture in development, explores denitions of
culture and proposes a new conceptual framework.

10

The historical context

Culture is ordinary . . . every human society has its own shape, its own
purposes its own meanings. Every human society expresses these, in
institutions, and in arts and learning.The making of a society is the
nding of common meanings and directions, and its growth is an active
debate and amendment under the pressures of experience, contact, and
discovery, writing themselves into the land.
Williams, 1993
People have used cultural and creative forms for survival, education and social comment for
centuries. From the rock art and corroborees of indigenous Australians, and the drama of
Aristotle and Brecht, to the television soap operas of today, people have been tapping into the
culture and creativity of their time and place to achieve human development goals.
For many years culture was ignored in the discourse of mainstream development, though
aspects of culture have been prominent in some development disciplines such as social
anthropology and development communications. Development practitioners have been
drawing on local cultural forms as part of the process of building participation and dialogue
with communities for more than 30 years.
The historical heritage, the language, the monuments and
legends, the specic forms of spirituality and the knowhow, the memory of ancient struggles or strong feats of
resistance, the ancestral cosmology and craftsmanship,
the contemporary or past artistic creations, the local and
original ways of organising work, family or village life, are
all elements that contribute to culture. It follows therefore
that any project with the intention of revalorising,
revitalising or restoring these cultural elements is a
springboard to development. (Verhelst, 1996).

This work can be traced back to the late 19th century. In the 1980s
scholars in Tanzania were talking of a century-old popular
theatre movement (Chambulikazi, 1982). There are records
of a village drama movement in China in the 1940s which used
theatre as part of community education (Kidd,1982), with
similar activities recorded in Africa, Indonesia, India, Pakistan and
the Caribbean in the 1950s. Since the 1980s there has been a
gradual emergence of a specialised area of practice combining
skills from participatory development, socio-cultural analysis,
communications, community arts and community media, as well
as other forms of popular media.

Interest has grown in culture and development partly because some of this work was effective,
and partly because it was seen as innovative and had novelty value. Since the mid-1990s there
has been a broadening of interest in culture in its many different interpretations and there
has been increasing recognition of local cultural resources as useful social and
economic drivers of development. A study by the World Faiths Development Dialogue
concluded that: no programme can bring positive and lasting results, unless it is well
anchored in the cultural norms and values of the affected society (WFDD, 2001).
LEFT from Adugna Potentials, a

project within the Ethiopian

Gemini Trust. Rosa Verhoeve,
2003.
BELOW Save The Children UK.

There is now an international debate about the importance of recognising and promoting
cultural diversity in development, raising some challenging questions about cultural rights,
identity and self-determination; and still more interesting discussions emerging about the
role of culture in global politics and conict transformation.
Certainly, there is now evidence that the use of culture in
development programmes is widespread. Though the data
in the Routemapping research focused on cultural activities
that were easier to track than more general socio-cultural
projects, the quantitative results clearly indicate a signicant,
hidden area of activity.

11

What do we mean by culture?

In its broadest sense, culture today can be viewed as a set of distinctive
spiritual and material, intellectual and emotional characteristics which
dene a society or social group. In addition to the arts and letters, it
encompasses ways of life and fundamental rights of the person, value
systems, traditions and beliefs.
Mexico City Declaration on Cultural Policies, UNESCO, 1982.
Culture is still generally regarded as a slippery concept for the development sector to grasp.
Frequently, to secure support for exploration and research it has to be buried within
other more acceptable concepts like traditional knowledge and civic engagement. Everyone
talks about culture, quietly and in code. But the sector is not particularly well attuned to
acknowledging it.
BELOW Traditional storyteller in

Chittagong Hill Tracts,

Bangladesh. Creative
Exchange/Susanna Wilford, 1999.
RIGHT An image from the
Cambodian Health Education
Media Services (CHEMS).
Health Unlimited.

Culture is a concept of many meanings (Arizipe 2002). As Raymond Williams noted in

the 1950s: We use the word culture in these two senses: to mean a whole way of life the
common meanings; to mean the arts and learning the special processes of discovery and
creative effort (Williams, 1993).
Culture, welded as it is to notions of ancestry, political afliation, and nationhood, is a very
sensitive issue in politics and policy . . . the polarised views on culture expressed in the past fty
years . . . see it alternatively as a positive or a negative force in development (Arizipe, 2002).

12

The ambiguity of culture conspired against it in the aftermath of World War II, when the
United Nations and Bretton Woods institutions were established: development actions were
splintered among different agencies, government ministries and public sector organisations.
Rarely were cultural and development activities retained toThe Swedish International Development Agency (SIDA)
gether within the portfolio of one agency. In development,
is fairly unique in combining a cultural relations role
priority was given to economic, technical and scientic growth
with a development remit. It has long held a policy on
in which culture was regarded as immaterial. Within the rights
culture and development, which stated that:Sustainable
agenda, culture was a low priority, a complex and uncomfortable
development and the ourishing of culture are
issue over which states held divergent views.
interdependent. One of the chief aims of human
The result was: the stealthily dissolving sense of meaning and
development is the social and cultural fullment
purpose as development models leave out the constitutive
of the individual. (SIDA, 2000)
aspect of culture in peoples lives . . . Development policies have
forgotten what Ghandi once said: we need: a recognition that economic activity, at every
stage of technical development, has no value except as a contribution to a social aim.
(Arizipe, 2002).
In the Routemapping project, researchers found that, in practical terms, culture means
different things to development practitioners from different backgrounds. For example, when
asked about a cultural approach to development, all London-based personnel responded
with information about projects that have some component of arts or culture, popular
communications methods and/or media or participatory processes.
On the other hand, although responses from local personnel in developing countries (in both
Africa and South/South East Asia) identied similar activities to London-based personnel,
they also noted broader concepts like a more holistic cultural approach to development
(Actionaid Ethiopia, Routemapping research process) and
cultural action (Actionaid Pakistan, Routemapping research
There is not enough consideration given to the explicit
process). There was a sense that country personnel had a
intent to use culture . . . most projects are probably doing
stronger sense of a mutable denition of culture and the need
something but it is not planned or systematic, probably
to engage with it at different levels according to the proposed
being done as part of participatory processes so the
purpose.
relevance, rationale, aims/objectives [with respect to
culture] are not made explicit (Save the Children UK
Thailand, Routemapping research process).
From the late 1990s to the current time, development
philosophy has been beginning to emphasise the
importance of development embedded in culture (as the
basis of identity) and the need to celebrate culture and
identity which has led to revitalisation/revival of interest
in culture on the sub-continent, but within the current
context, not as a means of re-establishing the old context
(for example, there is revived interest in the songs sung by
women while grinding cereals for food.The interest is in
the content of the songs not the context of having to grind
grain by hand again). Culture is not yet [being] taken
seriously enough in practice.With participatory processes
many people indulge in the rhetoric but fail to implement
the approach in practice but in the case of culture, not
only is there little practice but the rhetoric is still lacking
(AA Regional Ofce,Thailand, Routemapping research
process).

13

This owering of engagement between development and culture

is not without its challenges, however. There is anxiety in the
arts-based cultural sector and participatory development
circles about the appropriation of culture and cultural forms of
expression for social and economic engineering.
This sense of anxiety possibly stems from a fear that the use of
culture (in all its forms) could overspill into an abuse of culture by
powerful agencies and development actors. And in turn, there is
concern that this could amount to interference and manipulation
of the self-determination of poor people in the name of
economic or social development.

The Levels Model:Towards a conceptual

framework for culture and development
As a consequence of the Routemapping research, the researchers initially identied three
different conceptual levels of culture Culture as Context, Culture as Content and Culture as
Method (Marsh & Gould, 2003). These conceptual levels were not demonstrated overtly in
the data, nor were they explicitly dened by users. Yet they were evident in the dialogue and
practice of the development practitioners during project visits and interviews undertaken in
the course of the project.
During the process of further analysis and reection following the research phase of the
project, researchers identied a fourth level culture as expression initially conceived as
part of the third level, but subsequently dened as a separate level.
The conceptual levels are as follows. It is worth noting that they could apply as much to
traditional cultures as to much newer sub-cultures of communities of interest, such as
young skateboarders:

Culture as context for development: the socio-politico-cultural environment that needs to be taken into
account in development activity. It may be that a programme or project will need to acknowledge how and why it will be challenging culture e.g. in the context of female genital cutting or
traditional gender roles, or it may be that a project will be able to acknowledge how and why
it is embedded in and drawing on local socio-political dynamics to enhance the development
process e.g. working with monks or traditional faith healers

Culture as content in development:

the content of local languages, practices, objects or traditions may

be drawn upon in the development process e.g. use of a traditional dance, content of a
traditional song, or other items with cultural signicance, such as clothing or artefacts.

Culture as method within development:

the medium or cultural forms (traditional or otherwise) that

programmes/projects may use in order to address development issues e.g. song, drama,
dance, poetry, music, video, radio or photography.

Culture as expression: consists of the intangible, dynamic and creative elements of culture that connect with our
beliefs, values, attitudes, feelings, emotions, and ways of viewing the world. Expression is
fundamental to self-determination, community engagement and to imagining futures.
Development processes that foster expression and engagement, have socio-cultural relevance and create resonance with the lived experiences of beneciaries, stand a greater
chance of contributing to quality of life and sustainable solutions.
Cultural approaches are being applied in the development arena in two observable ways:
As a tool: cultural approaches are used in an instrumentalist manner and are generally messagebased. The tool-based approach is generally intended to inform, although it is sometimes
used in such a way so as to allow or try to encourage some degree of participation, but ultimately its outputs are usually pre-determined by those controlling the development process.
As a process: cultural approaches are the basis of a liberationist approach that endeavours to
explicitly address issues of shifting power and strengthening peoples control over the development process. It starts from peoples own experience and involves a participatory creative
process, the output of which is not pre-determined.
LEFT Save The Children, UK.
RIGHT Images from The Story
Workshop Educational Trust,
Malawi. Story Workshop
Educational Trust.

14

In trying to contextualise this model we have developed an analogy of a living

space whether house, hut or temporary encampment.We have employed a rather
western notion of a house to illustrate this analogy (below) but the concept would
still apply in other living contexts.
Context is like the location:
Where is it? Why is it there?
How old is it?
What is its setting?
What is its history?
How does it relate to other places?
Method and expression are like the human
interactions in the house:
Method is the way you interact.What form is
used? Why?
Expression is what you say.What is expressed?
Why is it expressed? What happens as a result?

Content is like the physical characteristics

of the house:
What style is it?
Who owns it, lives in it or shares it?
What materials is it made of and where did
those materials come from?
What is it used for?
What is the furniture like?
Whats on the walls?

Figure 1:A visual representation of the levels of culture framework

Exploring Context

What are the cultural factors that underpin a community and its way of life?

What are its traditional power structures, hierarchies and decision-making channels?

What are its basic codes and ethics and how/why have they evolved?

What is its cultural, political, economic and social history?

How does the community relate to time, spirituality, nutrition, life/death, the
natural world?

How does it pass its context on through education and other mechanisms?

How does it subsist and what modes exist for exchange/credit/support?

Exploring Content

How does it represent its context

through symbols and images?

What aesthetic, elite, popular or ritual
processes exist to link daily life to
that context (ceremonies, traditional
festivals)?

What traditional or other knowledge
and know-how does the community
draw upon?

What cultural resources does it have
heritage, traditions, craft/artisan skills,
cuisine, forms of expression?

Who owns, participates in or develops
these cultural resources?
15

RIGHT Children invloved in

a Theatre for Development

project, Nepal.
Karna. B, Maharjan.
BELOW Adugna Potentials
participant, Ethiopia.
Rosa Verhoeve, 2003.

Exploring Method

What cultural forms are appropriate and relevant in the development process?

For what purpose is the method being used?

Is the approach message driven?

Is the approach intended to be liberationist and empowering?

Who has control of the objectives, inputs and outputs?

Are control and implementation strategies appropriate to the context, content and purpose?

Has the use and purpose of the cultural form been negotiated with the local community?

Exploring Expression

What is being expressed?

Who is doing the expressing the agency, the participants, the beneciaries?

Who does the expression have resonance for?

What is the response to the expression?

16

What is the role of culture in development?

We need a sea change in the way we look at culture in order to create
a more productive relationship between anthropology and economics,
between culture and development, in the battle against poverty.This
change requires us to place futurity, rather than pastness, at the heart of
our thinking about culture . . .This does not mean that we need to forget
about culture in its broadest sense, as the sense of tradition, the fabric of
everyday understandings, the archive of memory and producer of
monuments, arts and crafts. Nor do we need to slight the idea that
culture is the fount of human expression in its fullest range, including the
arts, music, theatre and language. Culture is all these things as well. But
culture is a dialogue between aspirations and sedimented traditions.And
in our commendable zeal for the latter at the cost of the former, we have
allowed unnecessary, harmful and articial opposition to emerge
between culture and development.
Arjun Appadurai,The Capacity to Aspire, Culture and Public Action,World Bank, 2004.
There is a sense of intensifying connections between human development, socio-cultural
issues, cultural heritage and diversity (identity, values, beliefs) and cultural forms of expression
(popular arts and media activities) which have not yet been fully linked and mapped. Certainly
those connections exist in numerous examples in development, community participation and
the arts sector across the world.
Young performers in a Dhaka
slum perform a drama on the
rights of the girl child.
Creative Exchange/Susanna
Wilford, 1999.

It may effectively be seen as a dynamic system in which cultural forms of expression and
cultural products are connected to and can negotiate with different aspects of what has been
called the deep culture (after Gaultung) or the soft-ware of social life (WFDD, 2001) in
ways which produce complex, divergent and multilateral outcomes.

17

Figure 2: Outcomes from making culture visible

Economic outcomes e.g. cultural
products, tourism, audio-visual
industries, micro-industries.

Capacity outcomes e.g. skills, knowledge,

learning, capacity to act, self-condence,
vocalisation of needs/concerns.

Social outcomes e.g. inclusion of excluded

groups, access to resources, better networking
and bridging in communities (social capital),
cohesion, improved quality of life.

Attitude/Behaviour e.g. underlying climate of

change: local attitudes, codes, behaviour,
emotions, relationships, beliefs surfaced.

Deep Culture

Development or community
actions, which link to and/or
drawing on local cultures and
forms of expression.

Communication outcomes e.g. community

perspective vocalised, greater knowledge and
awareness of issues, awareness of
needs/barriers to change.

Rights outcomes e.g. awareness of social,

political and cultural rights and responsibilities,

Cultural outcomes e.g. Sense of identity and

belonging, awareness of diversity, cultural
self-condence.

Inuencing outcomes e.g.improved

interactions with policymakers, stakeholders,
and governance systems

Environmental outcomes: relationships to built

or natural environment exposed, environments
may be improved, affecting quality of life.

18

Children at Katha Delhi.

Katha.

An analogy for this complex, multilevelled impact of culture might be sources of light hitting
a lens: the shape and properties of the lens will affect how the light is reected and refracted.
At times, some of the hidden qualities of the light, which may be essential to successful
outcomes, may become visible through this process such as local attitudes and values, ways
of thinking, sense of time and priorities.

One of the enduring features of social or developmental projects which draw on cultural issues,local
cultural content or forms of expression is the wide range of impacts which can be achieved
simultaneously on, for example: awareness, individual capacity, economic potential, human rights,
social interaction and identity/diversity. The development
Multiple impacts
context in which cultural projects take place, e.g. human rights,
One of the case studies explored in the Routemapping culture
may affect the depth of outcomes in one area but not necessarily
and development research Adugna Community Dance
limit the range of outcomes in other areas.
Theatre Group in Ethiopia (see page 61) have undertaken
Culture is therefore a multi-levelled arena for development.
rights-based workshops with street children using video to
But as development is not even conscious of this, let alone
raise awareness of rights; they worked with the Ethiopian
capturing the impacts which are owing at different levels,
police force to raise awareness of the rights of street children
then a huge array of opportunities will be missed.
using dance and drama workshops.This work has
simultaneously addressed the capacity of both street
children and the police; it has had communication outcomes
in promoting awareness of discrimination faced by street
children; and it has inuenced the police training and
improved treatment of street children.
Within the same family of projects Gem TV produced a video
about female child abduction,rape and forced marriage.It
was originally intended as a tool to encourage the community
to reect on the practice and discuss its implications for the
sustainable development of the community.It was shown at
a workshop held in the Ethiopian Parliament in 2003 and affected
members to such an extent that they declared their intent to
legislate against the practice.(Routemapping research).

19

SECTION TWO

Thinking culturally
Explores the visibility of culture and reects
on the relationship between culture and some
primary development agendas social
development, economic growth, poverty, rights,
education and communications.
20

Making culture visible

A culturally informed perspective is not so much a prescription as
it is a lens a way of seeing. It sees individuals as driven by a culturally
inuenced set of motives, incentives, beliefs and identities that interact
with economic incentives to affect outcomes.
Rao/Walton, 2004
LEFT From Adugna Potentials,

a project within the Ethiopian

Gemini Trust. Rosa Verhoeve,
2003.

Making culture visible comes from thinking culturally. If development is looking through the
cultural lens it starts to see all that it does from a cultural perspective. One of the starkest
ndings of the Routemapping research is not the absence of cultural thinking, awareness and
commitment in the development sector, but the apparent invisibility of culture despite quite
signicant investment and activity.
As we have seen in the Routemapping results, agencies attest to the importance of culture in
development; certainly, the level of nancial resourcing and the scale of activity is evidence
that culture is embedded in development practice. There is strong commitment and engagement among key individuals in those agencies. But this doesnt tend to convert into an explicit
and agency-wide acknowledgement of the role of culture in the development process.

According to TearFund theological advisor, Dewi Hughes,

industrialisation, economic development and the aggressive
materialism of Anglo-American identity, the failure to
acknowledge indigenous forms of wisdom, and the
predominance of a western way of doing things have done
irreparable violence and harm to cultural identity.Modernists
would say that these economic and political freedoms are the
key freedoms.As long as people can eat, work and vote,
celebration can take care of itself.The language of the
newspaper, the radio programme, the song or the play is not
important. One universal language and idiom will do for the
modernist utopia. Death to ethnic diversity. (Hughes, 2003)

The effect of this invisibility has already been charted:

there is no system of ensuring that development activity is
culturally sensitive and respects cultural rights and diversity;
culture rarely features at policy level, so there is no incentive
to collect data on cultural issues and impact, and to adjust
priorities and programmes accordingly; there is very limited
evaluation and quality control of cultural projects.
Amartya Sen has ascribed neglect, or comparative indifference towards culture in the development sector to
economists scepticism. The neglect prevails because
development systems are predominately inuenced by the
thinking of economists and nancial experts. (Sen, in
Rao/Walton, 2004)

Invisibility probably also exists because of assumptions which are made in dominant northern development paradigms about what culture is and does. Development professionals in
the North as the Routemapping research illustrated have a tendency to associate the
word culture either with arts or alternatively with social trends.
There is a tendency for development professionals from the southern hemisphere to have a more
rounded view of culture and creativity and its relationship to development. Local staff of
northern agencies can often nd themselves caught between these two polarities: implementing
programmes which take little stock of culture in communities where culture is part of the ticking
heart of daily life and to which those staff belong.

In 1994 an aid organisation was approached for information

about ongoing arts activities in refugee camps in Croatia and
Bosnia.The desk ofcer insisted the organisation doesnt do
arts projects. Meanwhile, in the eld, one of its ofcials had
described these arts activities as:more important than the
provision of living essentials, in terms of their impact on
psycho-social support of refugees. Evidently, desk staff in
London were not aware that they did do arts projects, and
they were having an impact on their humanitarian objectives.
Now humanitarian aid agencies frequently incorporate arts
activities as part of psycho-social support and also within
communications projects on key subjects such as health,
water, hygiene and hazards (mines, for example), and they
are becoming more comfortable in acknowledging their role.
(Source Creative Exchange, Kosovo:The Creative Challenge)

21

Where the notion is of culture as the arts, value judgments

are often made of the we dont do that variety which
exclude the possibility that there is any meaningful connection
between culture, in a creative sense, and development.
The alternative is that development professionals, many with a
thorough grounding in anthropology and social development,
adopt the of course we do culture approach, implying that
they may have long-since internalised much of the rational
thinking about culture into their daily processes. But since
there is no quantiable evidence of the values and assumptions
upon which their thinking is based, this can neither be judged
nor justied, and because it is internalised, culture again
remains invisible.
Invisibility also arises from a failure to understand the role
which culture is playing within the development process, and

the interdependency between the anthropological deep culture and creative, expressive
culture, as illustrated on page 17 (What is the role of culture in development. Plenty of development agencies currently see creative activities as a powerful means of communicating
information about health, rights and governance. But do they see beyond its role as a rather
elaborate megaphone for development messages?
There is evidence of screening out of cultural/creative
activities, even when they have demonstrated impact. In one
case an agencys external evaluator failed to mention that
any cultural activities, such as drama, were used to address
FGM in North Africa. However, the agencys country director
described drama as the primary means of communication
used by the projects Community Action Teams, which made
it critical to the project process. (Marsh/Gould, 2003)

Treating creative, expressive culture simply as an instrument

of development is missing an opportunity to connect with
the cultural ow of a community and to engage and build
dialogue on development issues within that culture.
Furthermore, treating culture as a tool may also be
contributing to its invisibility: just as the type of tool used to
dig a well is probably not relevant to an evaluation of a well
digging project, so the cultural medium for the message
rarely attracts comment or attention.

The other, more insidious, possibility is that culture is invisible because cultural plurality is
inconvenient for development. It is far easier for the machinery of development to function in
a world where cultures do not get in the way of political and economic progress; where
communities share a set of universal values which make them respond uniformly to change.
Furthermore, culture is part of the landscape of human rights which makes it doubly
uncomfortable not only are people diverse in language, thought, belief and identity, but it is
part of their inalienable rights to remain so.
Would development really want cultural heterogeneity? The loss of diversity might present
as great a challenge to humanity as the loss of biodiversity. A culturally monotonic world
would mean the end of creativity, says anthropologist, Lourdes Arizpe (in Rao/Walton, 2004)
Fostering creativity, then, becomes a priority for culture and development policies, and
freedom to create, a priority for human development. (Arizpe, 2004). And in accepting this,
the circle is squared. In thinking culturally, the development sector cannot be selective about
what type of culture it relates to without seeing the interdependence of the whole: it cannot
relate just to the wider cultural context of development without accepting the value of
cultural content, method or cultural expression to human development.
Recognition of the cultural dimension of development does not mean wholesale change as
the Routemapping research has shown, it is already happening, but it requires acknowledgement. The systems are in place; it is the way in which they are applied which may require
some retuning. It does mean that additional data needs to be collected; this data may point
to an adjustment in priorities; once certain facts about culture and quality of life are taken
into account, and once there is a better understanding of what culture delivers at each level
for development, programmes and projects may be conceived and managed differently.
Rehearsal room, Ethiopia.
Rosa Verhoeve, 2003.

22

Invisibility will persist unless there is greater awareness of the cultural dimension of development
and unless cultural data is collected: if the range of facts, upon which development decisions are
based, and programmes and projects conceived, are not culturally grounded, then inevitably
development thinking, planning and actions will ignore the cultural dimension. Like a searchlight
focused in one direction, the landscape outside the focus of the beam remains dark and
unexposed. So it is with culture at present it is outside the beam of most development thinking.
Save the Children UK.

Key questions

The development sector is full of cultural thinking, awareness and commitment, but this
is currently invisible.

What is your agency doing which it might see as cultural (in terms of context, content, method
and/or expression)? How much do you know about this activity? What are you spending on it?
Where is it happening? What benet is it having for the agency and for its beneciaries?
The dominance of economic thinking in development has led to a prevailing climate of
neglect of culture.

What does culture add to the non-cash economy? How does it contribute to the development
of social capital? How do cultural attitudes affect economic outcomes? How can economic
thinking start to acknowledge the cultural dimension?
Economists and nancial analysts are failing to consider the possible economic benets
to development of the creative industries.

Does your agency support projects which develop the economic potential of the creative
industries? How successful are these projects in delivering economic development? Are
there other social benets which ow from these projects?
Development professionals make assumptions about culture and how it inuences
development, which contribute to its invisibility in development.Where culture is viewed
as arts there is sometimes a tendency to see it as irrelevant to development; where the
anthropological interpretation is taken, it is assumed that agencies are already doing it.

What does culture mean to you and your agency are there different interpretations between
desk and eld level?

What assumptions are made about different interpretations of culture and their relationship
to development policy and activity?

Is your/your agencys thinking really culturally sensitive? How does awareness of the cultural
issues in communities inuence your work? How do projects connect and communicate with
the cultural context?

23

Exploring culture in key

development agendas
Culture and social development
Peoples creative energies, the primary resource for any change, can
never be harnessed unless their spirits are revived and a sense of dignity
restored. Until this is done people will continue to be mere recipients of
material aid rather than active and creative participants in a process of
change. Dr. Fouzia Saeed,ActionAids country director for Pakistan.
Saeed, 2003
In the early 1980s with closer examination of development failures came a dawning of
recognition that economic and social development without culture was growth without a
soul (UNESCO, 1995).
Without reference to culture, development has: contributed to the destruction of many
societies and community structures. It has brought with it the imposition of the cultural norms
of the development institutions and their agents, as though these had some universal validity
(WFDD, 2001). This was accepted at an international level in 1982 when the UNESCO Mexico
City Declaration on Cultural Policies stated that: Balanced development can only be ensured
by making cultural factors an integral part of the strategies
There were a series of well documented development
designed to achieve it, consequently, these strategies should
failures with the Turkana of Kenya during the 1970s and
always be devised in the light of the historical, social and
1980s which arose from a lack of understanding of their
cultural context of each society (UNESCO, 1982).
pastoralist culture, which placed livestock at the centre of
their existence: stock rights are linked to kinship, initiation
There have been consistent efforts to integrate culture into
rights for young males focus on the killing of the animals;
human development thinking. UNESCO led a world decade
dowry payments are made in stock and any children of a
on the subject from 1986 to 1997 which produced some
union not sanctied by stock are regarded as illegitimate
powerful evidence and literature. In 1994 the United Nations
and do not have to be supported by their father.A Turkana
Development Programme conducted an internal review of the
who loses all his livestock is regarded as a failure. Famine
role of culture in human development and concluded that:
camps, large irrigation schemes and, eventually a sh
ultimately this social and cultural context will inuence how
farm, only served to erode their self-sufciency. Donors
people will respond to change and their interest and ability
failed to realise the heavy social impact that introducing
to participate in development. It will determine the extent
pastoralists to a life without stock would have:Turkana
to which womens empowerment, childrens education,
workers could not enter traditional marriages;
environmental rehabilitation, household food security,
children were regarded as illegitimate and women had no
population management or other goals can be met. In other
claim on the earnings of their partners. Prostitution, which
words, culture is a major factor in creating an enabling
had been unheard of in the nomadic community,
environment for change or the reverse (Perrett, 1994).
blossomed. (Harden, 1993).
Despite the repeated recognition of the essential, underpinning
role of culture in development, it has not really had an impact on human development thinking or
policies. There are no cultural indicators within poverty and human development indices which
could illustrate how cultural factors are inuencing development and poverty eradication.
Human development used to be dened as: widening peoples choices. But there has been
a limited amount of reasoning in human development rhetoric that peoples choices might
be dictated by cultures.The UNDPs 2004 Human Development Report has, for the rst time,
acknowledged the importance of cultural diversity and cultural liberty in development.
The report argues that cultural identities have been supressed leading to persecution and
ethnic cleansing, but also to everyday exclusion and discrimination. It argues that cultural
liberty must become a central aspect of human development. It highlights research that
shows that one in seven people worldwide is culturally excluded (UNDP, 2004) by direct
discrimination on the basis of their cultural identity. But most frequently this exclusion
happens, it says, because of a simple lack of recognition or respect for the culture and
heritage of people. (UNDP, 2004) This exclusion must be confronted by development actors
if they are to combat poverty.

24

Children in Ahmedabad, Gurat,

India. John Martin, Pan Centre
for Intercultural Arts.

Key questions

If the world is to reach the MDGs and ultimately eradicate poverty, it must rst successfully
confront the challenge of how to become inclusive culturally diverse societies. Not just
because doing so successfully is a precondition for countries to focus properly on other priorities
of economic growth, health and education for all citizens. But because allowing people full
cultural expression is an important development end in itself, writes Mark Malloch Brown,
Administrator of UNDP.
Development can become destructive if it proceeds without reference to culture.

How can culture play a more meaningful role in development planning?

What indicators could be used to illustrate the role of culture in human development?

What are the implications of full cultural expression? Can cultural liberty exist?
What implications would it have for cultural practices which infringed the rights of others?

How do development programmes manage cultural diversity?
How do they plan for it and assess its impact?

25

Culture and economic development

To have a high GNP per head but little music, arts, literature, etc. would
not amount to a major developmental success. In one form or another,
culture engulfs our lives, our desires, our frustrations, our ambitions, and
the freedoms that we seek.The freedom and opportunity for cultural
activities are among the basic freedoms that enhancement of which
can be seen to be constitutive of development.Amartya Sen, How Does
Culture Matter?
(in Rao/Walton, 2004)
There has been little assessment of the value of culture to economic development. The most
obvious links are with cultural and creative industries such as tourism, heritage sites, cultural
goods (literature, crafts and other artistic products) and the audio-visual industries (music,
lm, television, radio etc).
In the economic context alone, culture warrants a higher prole in development. In the UK,
the creative industries generate 60 billion a year, employ 1.4 million people and contribute
over 4 per cent of GDP greater than the contribution of the
Cultural goods constituted 3.8 per cent of all imports in
manufacturing industry (DCMS, 1998)
1990 according to UNESCOs Institute of Statistics. By 1996,
There have been recent examples of development donors investing
cultural goods had surpassed defence, automobiles,
in cultural producers as part of economic development strategies.
agriculture and aerospace as the largest proportion of
exports in the USA. (Culture Committee of UK UNESCO, 2001) There is evidence that these projects can make a difference to
economic development, whether on a large or community scale.
The Virtual Souk, with World Bank and NGO investment, sells products from Tunisia, Lebanon and
Morocco via the Internet. As a result artisans have doubled their income (Duer, 1999). Projects
Save The Children UK.
based on traditional skills provide essential income: in Peru, two-thirds of the regions artisans

26

The Self Employed Womens Association (SEWA) in Lucknow,

India, was set up in 1984 to help workers involved in traditional
embroidery. SEWA started marketing members work through
exhibitions and established retail outlets in Delhi and Lucknow.
Membership expanded to 5,000 workers and their families and
sales grew to 25 million rupees by the mid-1990s.The growth
in income allowed SEWA to develop other services such as
credit, training and education for members and help out with
issues such as sanitation and housing. (Landry, 2001).

were said to have no other source of income than fair trade

deals for their craftwork (Gould, 1996).

Hudderseld Creative Town Initiative (CTI) was developed

in 1997 as part of a European Union programme to test
innovations in urban strategy. Hudderseld is an industrial
town in northern eastern England which suffered decline and
recession in the 1980s.The project invested in a series of 16
experimental pilots aimed at developing a cycle of urban
creativity. It involved investing in the development of training
and business development, establishing networks and building
opportunities for dissemination. It also aimed to change the
perception of the town as a creative city.In 1997, at the start
of the CTI, creativity was seen by the leadership in Hudderseld
as something vague, woolly and of relevance only to the arts.
Two years later, enabling people and organisations to be
creative was recognized as a means of unleashing talent and
harnessing intellectual capital (Landry, 2000)

Beyond the simple arithmetic of cultural production =

economic development lies a further axis of engagement
with culture, one which has been tested in regeneration
programmes in the UK. Pegging the regeneration of a region
on the cultural industries has proved effective not only in
terms of economic but also social development.

A popular contemporary focus of the development sector is

the growth of information media in developing countries.
But there is no clear reason why audio-visual media are less
worthy of interest or investment, especially when there are
such high-yielding industries in other parts of the world.

There is a need to invest in the creative industries and professionals of developing countries to enable them to contribute to, and ultimately enrich and
diversify, this huge world market. There is much to be gained, not only from an economic
perspective, but for the cultural self-condence of the least developed nations, and also from
the perspective of generating greater awareness and understanding of the importance of
cultural diversity at a global level.

The Australian Town of Broken Hill is 500 kilometres north of

Adelaide in the heart of the South Australian outback. Rich
deposits of silver, zinc and lead made it the centre of Australian
ore mining in the late 19th century. But as the mineral deposits
dwindled the great mining concerns pulled out in the 1960s
leaving a town of 24,500 people with few other sources of
income, and a desert landscape transformed into a dustbowl
and scarred by industry.The inhabitants, bereft of much else by
way of trade, turned to the visual arts, earning it the moniker of
The Artback. By 1994 there were 21 galleries in the town and
outlying regions, some recording 30,000 visitors a year.
(Gould, 1995)
RIGHT Radio soap opera actor.
BELOW Studio operator.
Both from the Cambodian
Health Education Media
Service, (CHEMS).
Health Unlimited.

27

Key questions

Culture can make a useful contribution to economic development through the cultural
and audio visual industries.

What opportunities are there for development agencies to start contributing to the growth
of cultural industries investing in building blocks like training, technical facilities, rights and
licensing?

Why is ICT perceived as a relevant target for donor investment, and the audio-visual and
cultural industries are not?

What opportunities are there to revive interest in small-scale cultural industries development
as part of local social development projects?

What evidence is there of the impact of such small scale cultural projects on wider economic
and social development targets?

ABOVE Filming in a youth camp

for the Cambodian Health
Education Media Services
(CHEMS). Health Unlimited.
RIGHT Save the Children UK.

28

Culture and poverty reduction

Poverty involves much more than the restrictions imposed by lack of
income. It also entails lack of basic capabilities to lead full, creative lives
as when people suffer from poor health, are excluded from participating
in the decisions that affect their communities, or have no right to guide
the course of their lives. Such deprivations distinguish human poverty
from income poverty.
UNDP, 2003
The Millennium Declaration rededicated the world community to resolving international
problems of an economic, political, humanitarian and cultural character. It restated the
importance of cultural rights, within the family of rights. Diversity of belief, culture and
language should, it said,be cherished as a precious asset of humanity.
The culturally-inclusive undertones which run through the declaration are not reected
in the eventuating Millennium Development Goals. But nonetheless the culture context is
a persistent factor in determining the achievement of the goals and its targets. Cultural
methods reect the precious asset of global cultural diversity, and are frequently used in
programmes which aim to achieve MDG targets. Applying the cultural lens to the MDGs
starts to illustrate some of the relationships between culture and their implementation.

Table 1 Opportunities for Cultural Action in the Millennium Development Goals

Goal

Opportunities for cultural action

Eradicate extreme poverty

and hunger

Economic development opportunities through small-scale subsistence crafts, and larger

larger scale opportunities for growth through creative industries development.

Universal primary education

Education and literacy, and rights to such by both boys and girls, are promoted in non-formal
education projects and cultural initiatives focusing on the right to education.

Gender equality and

empowerment

The majority of cultural projects promote gender equality, some have addressed political
involvement and the right to vote among women.

Reduce child mortality

Projects raising awareness of preventative healthcare have had direct impact on child
mortality one project reduced infant deaths by more than 50% over 12 years.

Improve maternal health

Popular media education projects, such as a radio soap opera in Afghanistan, have had
a successful and sustained impact on awareness of maternal health issues. Birth traditions
and the role of traditional birth attendants have been recognised as important to safety and
well-being.

Combat HIV/AIDS, malaria

and other diseases

HIV/AIDS is a common theme for many cultural initiatives, especially those using
drama and participatory processe, lm and popular media. Other media and cultural projects
have addressed malaria and TB transmission.

Ensure environmental
sustainability

Cultural methods used in community-based education models on sustainable forestry;

cultural traditions may link to methods of land and environmental management, and
expressing relationship to the natural world.

Develop a global partnership

New technologies could be widened to include the development of cultural industries.

Opportunities to develop capacity-building and skills development projects for youth; the
programmes tackling regeneration and income development for small regions through culture.

29

Culture and poverty analysis

The advent of poverty reduction strategy papers (PRSPs) as a means of measuring progress
towards the MDGs has started to bring up some important issues in relation to culture. PRSPs
draw their poverty diagnosis from a range of sources household, annual income and
employment surveys but the degree to which these routinely incorporate data on poverty
in relation to cultural groups, ethnic minorities or indigenous communities is not clear. There
is a case for incorporating cultural data into poverty
The Government of Nepal has modelled good practice in
diagnosis so that it does not overlook cultural aspects of
collecting poverty impact data on ethnic and caste groups
poverty and their impact on different cultural communities,
though their example has not been acknowledged in the
as well as the cultural health and well being of nations.
assessment of PRSPs.The PRSP for Nepal analysed the
Such data might include minorities accessing basic services
disparities in human development according to ethnic
such as sanitation, health and education, languages spoken,
groups (Janajaties) and castes (Dalits), as well as in relation
oral/written traditions, or even the outputs of the cultural
to different terrains Mountain, Hill and Terai peoples. Data
sector heritage, audio-visual products etc.
was drawn from the 1999 Nepal Human Development Report
The absence or invisibility of cultural data in a PRSP may
which collected data on life expectancy, literacy, education,
hide pockets of culturally-related poverty affecting specic
income and others across 9 different ethnic/caste groups.The
groups which are outside the beam of traditional forms of
PRSP notes some 60 castes and ethnic groups and around 70
languages and dialects, and notes the historical disadvantages assessment. Macro economic indicators may show a relatively
healthy or improving economic situation, in terms of GDP,
which have resulted in Janajaties and Dalits lagging behind in
masking a vastly different experience for certain ethnic or
terms of assets and income levels, as well as other areas of
cultural groups. At the extreme, the invisibility of cultural
human development such as education and health.The PRSP
issues at this level can, over the long term, lead to increasing
also acknowledges that problems have arisen in establishing
tension and conict where minorities feel they are perpetually
the different impacts of poverty on these different groups
because the Nepal Living Standards Survey (NLSS) aggregated being marginalised.
data for some of these groups, where the reality is of disparate
Some development agencies and governments are beginning
sub-groups. Nevertheless the PRSP has attempted to bring
to collect local and regional cultural data as part of poverty
some of the cultural and ethnic imbalances into focus: it notes
analysis. On page 44 we show how Tearfund has started to
that Janajaties have high poverty levels of between 45-59%,
address this issue and to consider cultural factors in setting
and Dalits even higher at 65-68%, while the indigenous Limbus
their country priorities.
have the highest rate of poverty at 71%. Hill Janajaties and
PRSPs have led to a drive towards greater consultation with
Dalits have higher levels of poverty than their Terai
national stakeholders from the private sector to civil society
counterparts.As a result of this data the Nepal government
groups on poverty reduction. This has presented an opportuhas established a Dalit Development Commission and Adibasi
nity to bring into the dialogue inequalities resulting from
Janajati Utthan Pratisthan (Indigenous and Ethnic Groups
ethnic or cultural issues.
Upliftment Academy). (International Monetary Fund, 2003)

My brother, my responsibility
a girl child of Bara, Nepal.
Pralhad Dhakal,VSO Nepal.

30

The Cambodian government chose to publish PRSP documents

in English. Civil society organisations protested that by failing
to make the written strategy available in Khmer they
effectively reduced levels of participation in the dialogue
on the PRSP.

Cultural factors inuence these partnerships, whether it is

something as basic as the language(s) and modes of communication in which consultation and dialogue is developed, or
whether the range of stakeholders is expanded to involve
cultural groups (from indigenous groups to tourism, broadcasting or museums professionals).

An obvious and simple act of cultural inclusiveness is to ensure that PRSPs are available not
just in majority languages, but in as many as possible of the minority languages which are
used. It may make consultation more cumbersome but the end result is greater inclusion and
awareness of how poverty reduction strategies will benet or not the diversity of people
within its ambit.The process of recognising and acknowledging identities in this way can have
a profound effect on cultural self-condence and inclusion.

Key questions

The Millennium Declaration recognises the importance of the cultural dimension of

development and describes cultural diversity as a cherished asset. Cultural factors
underlie the achievements of the Millennium Development Goals but are not explicit
in the goals and their targets.

What are the connections between your/your agencies work involving cultural issues/
approaches? How does this work contribute to achieving the targets in the MDGs?

On what data do you/your agency base strategic decisions and targets? Is there a cultural
component to this data? If not, what sources of data are available which might give this
added perspective?

How are cultural issues/imbalances reected in poverty reduction partnerships in which
you or your agency might be a part?

What groups/agencies are involved that bring cultural dimensions to the partnership?

Is the partnership informed by data on cultural issues e.g. relative poverty of ethnic/cultural
groups, health of cultural industries?

Working with pastoralist crafts

people in Ethiopia. Comic Relief.

31

Culture and human rights

The rights to culture include the possibility for each man to obtain the
means of developing his personality, through his direct participation in
the creation of human values, and of becoming, in this way, responsible
for his situation whether local or on a world scale.
UNESCO statement, Cultural Rights as Human Rights, 1970
Cultural rights are the least well developed of human rights. There have been decades of
debate about what exactly the universal declaration means by culture and cultural life;
the extent to which these rather nebulous terms can be enforced in law, and whether they
apply to individuals or groups. Governments, particularly, have been uncomfortable about
the latter because of the implications which might arise for self-determination and national
unity should groups start demanding cultural rights en masse. Cultural diversity adds a
further layer of complexity since a right to participate in one aspect of cultural life may lead
to an infringement of the cultural rights of another.Whos right takes precedent?
The issue of cultural rights is increasingly becoming an important topic for the development
sector as the UN system looks towards the better management of global cultural diversity in
the post-9/11era.
The UNESCO Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity of 2002 stated that:Cultural rights
are an integral part of human rightsthe ourishing of cultural diversity requires the full
implementation of cultural rights. Cultural diversity, it said, was as necessary for humankind
as biodiversity is for natureit widens the range of options open to everyone; it is one of the
roots of development, understood not simply in terms of economic growth, but also as a
means to achieve a more satisfactory intellectual, emotional, moral and spiritual existence.

The main principles of cultural rights concern:

Self determination
The right to freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic,
social and cultural development. International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural
Rights (ICESCR) 1966, International Covenant of Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), 1966.
Non-discrimination on the basis of race, colour sex, language, religion, political or other
opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status. Universal Declaration
of Human Rights (UDHR), ICESCR.
Women in Ahmedabad, Gujarat,
India. John Martin Pan Centre
for Intercultural Arts.

Participation in cultural life

Everybody has the right to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy
the arts and share in scientic advancement and its benets. UDHR.
Freedom of opinion and expression
In those states in which ethnic, religious or linguistic
minorities exist, persons belonging to such minorities shall
not be denied the right in community with other members
of their group, to enjoy their own culture, to profess and
practice their own religion, or to use their own language.
ICCPR
Freedom of religious observation
Freedom of thought conscience and religion and the
freedom to change their religion or belief, and to observe
this alone or in community with others. UDHR
Cultural Diversity
Identity in origin in no way affects the fact that human beings can and may live
differently nor does it preclude the existence of differences based on cultural,
environmental and historical diversity, nor the right to maintain diversity.
Declaration on race and racial prejudice, UNESCO, 1978
Benet from moral and mental rights
There is a right for authors/creators to benet from the protection of moral and mental
interests arising from scientic, literary or artistic productions. ICESCR
32

Rights of the child; nalist from

a childrens art competition by
the Asian Regional Rights
Resources Centre. ARRC.

The Human Development Report 2004 has argued forcefully for greater recognition and
appreciation of cultural identity. Cultural liberty is a vital part of human development it
agues, because being able to choose ones identity who one is or being excluded from
other choices is important in leading a full life. People want the freedom to pracrice their
religion openly, to speak their language, to celebrate their ethnic or religious heritage without
fear or ridicule or punishment or diminished opportunity.
Close to half of the 6,000 languages spoken in the world
People want to participate in society without having to slip
are doomed or likely to disappear in the foreseeable future.
off their chosen cultural moorings. (UNDP, 2004)
The disappearance of any language is an irreplaceable
The implications of this debate need to be carefully considloss for the heritage of all humanity. UNESCO.Atlas of
ered by the development sector.The 1986 Declaration on the
the Worlds Languages in danger of disappearing.
Right to Development states that cultural development is
one of the essential quartet of human growth which is indispensable to the realisation of all
human rights and fundamental freedoms.
So in the era of rights-based approaches to development, arguably, a failure to consider the
cultural dimension in development is tantamount to an infringement of cultural rights.
The implications of a failure to consider development from the perspective of cultural rights
are already being witnessed. The Minorities at Risk research has indicated that almost 900
million people one in seven are discriminated against or disadvantaged on the basis of
cultural identity. (University of Maryland, Centre for International Development and Conict
Management in UNDP, 2004)
If development is going to address this form of exclusion and disadvantage, it needs to
expand the Human Rights approach to development to incorporate cultural rights.
At the very least, from the principle of do no harm, development agencies should ensure
that their work is not infringing on the principles of international cultural co-operation which
were set down by UNESCO 40 years ago. (see page 34)

33

Key questions

In concert with all other institutions, development agencies have a responsibility to ensure
that cultural rights of those they come into contact with are respected and upheld.

How are diverse cultures accorded dignity and value in development programmes and
what measures are taken to safeguard and protect cultures?

What rights issues are raised by harmful cultural practices and how are these issues
managed and what consultation is undertaken with communities?

How do development programmes contribute to cultural development and the
enrichment of cultures?

To what extent do development programmes contribute to the sharing and better
understanding of different ways of life?

Principle of International Cultural Cooperation, UNESCO, 1966

Article 1
1 Each culture has a dignity and value which must be respected and preserved
2 Every people has a right and a duty to develop its culture
3 In their right variety and diversity, and in the reciprocal inuence they exert on one
another, all cultures form part of the common heritage belonging to mankind
Article 4
The aims of international cultural cooperation in its various forms, bilateral or multilateral,
regional or universal, shall be
1 to spread knowledge, to stimulate talent and to enrich cultures
2 to develop peaceful relations and friendship among the peoples and bring about a better
understanding of each others way of life;
3 enable everyone to have access to knowledge, to enjoy the arts and literature of all
peoples, to share in advances made by science in all parts of the world and in the
resulting benets, and to contribute to the enrichment of cultural life
Article 5
Cultural cooperation is a right and a duty for all people and all nations which should share
with one another their knowledge and skills
Participants in a human rights
project,Ahmedabad, India.
John Martin, Pan Centre for
Intercultural Arts.

Article 6
International cooperation while promoting the enrichment of all cultures through
its benecent action, shall respect the distinctive character of each

34

Culture, education and participation

Knowledge emerges only through invention and re-invention, through
the restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry human beings pursue
in the world, with the world, and with each other... Education as the
practice of freedom as opposed to education as the practice of
domination denies that a man is abstract, isolated, independent and
unattached to the world: it also denies that the world exists as a reality
apart from people.Authentic reection considers neither abstract man
nor the world without people, but people in their relations with the world.
Friere, 1970
In the late 1960s, the radical approaches to education evolved by Paolo Freire and before him
Ivan Illich, were the foundation for participatory development. Both promoted informal
approaches which were deeply rooted in local cultures (Freire, 1970), which encouraged
people to nd pathways to learning based on their experiences and, in so doing, to nd
solutions to their own problems.
Into this new paradigm cultural activities were superimposed onto learning models. Some of
the experimental popular communications and education projects in Africa in the 1970s
became the learning and testing ground for methods such as Theatre for Development and
participatory video and other participatory methods.
A season of participatory arts activities in 30 schools promoted
by Portsmouth City Council in 1997 explored progress made
by 88 children in ve areas.The results showed marked positive
progress in the following: language skills 60%, physical
coordination 62%, observational skills 53%, creativity and
imagination 83%, social skills development 56%
(Matarasso, 1997).

There is a growing body of hard evidence from the arts sector

that cultural and expressive forms can contribute in complex
ways to learning, skills development and capacity building.

In development, the apparent subordination of cultural

approaches to participation over the past decade has become
problematic. Participatory approaches, which were once
perceived by the likes of Illich and Freire as a route round
institutionalisation, are themselves becoming institutionalised. They have been described as a
form of new tyranny perpetrated by the development sector (Cooke/Kothari, 2001).
There is a growing sense that both education and participation and communication programmes
(see page 37) are being implemented without adequate reference to culture as the essential
force which triggers development in general, and IEC in particular (UNESCO 2001). There is a
groundswell of support for better analysis of the cultural elements of human development,
which ensure that participation and change initiatives are creative and educational.

RIGHT Adugna Community

Dance Theatre, Ethiopia, in
workshops a HIV/AIDS club.
Creative Exchange/Mary
Marsh, 2003.
BELOW Theatre for development
workshop. Tim Prentki, Centre
for the Arts in Development
Communication.

35

It seems that culture can add value to educational, participatory or communications projects
by promoting a process of engagement, which has resonance for beneciaries and stimulates
creativity.Throughout the Routemapping research process, all the development professionals
with whom the researchers had contact held a deep-seated belief that something worked
when creativity or culture were tapped in some way, and they found that it stimulated a
response among their target groups and opened discussion
Our CEF project is rooted in the elements of joyful learning and and communication on subjects that had not previously
teaching.As most of us are working with severe resource
been discussed.
constraints and with no access to educational aids, we are
training teachers (young adults) on using different forms of
creative and arts activities to create teaching aids to make
learning more enjoyable and fun. Save the children UK
(SCUK, India) has developed posters on child trafcking and
sexual abuse and audio cassettes, and enabled 40 children to
develop lms on issues affecting them.They pinpointed the
benets of this work as: generating social dialogue,
supporting childrens dialogue with adults, and enabling them
to convey their views and opinions, encouraging participation,
helping create a joyful learning and teaching environment,
breaking the ice and establishing rapport and facilitating
non-intrusive situation analysis of issues such as prostitution
and HIV/AIDS. (SCUK, India, Routemapping research process).
SCUK Nepal has been using Theatre for Development (TfD)
in various education projects. In Sindhupalchowk district a
TfD project on the theme of improving schools helped
children visualise their ideal schools and then identity and
negotiate options for improvement.The agency reported that
the process was a a very empowering one.TfD and puppets
were used to increase the enrolment and retention of Dalit
girls in schools.The methodology kept peoples attention
and allowed people to reect on caste issues in a sensitive way.
It helped build the childrens capacity to negotiate and enter
dialogue with adult and institutional stakeholders (parents,
teachers, administrators, education ofcials).The project also
explored other issues arising from discrimination against girls
such as the uneven division of chores, food and education
among boys and girls.The children participating in the project
formed a network with representation from 10 village
committees to meet monthly to review and discuss their
activities. (SCUK India, Routemapping research process).
TOP Theatre for Development

in Nepal. Rajendra Khadka.

ABOVE Preparing the stage for

a community theatre
performance, as part of
Cambodian Health Education
Media Services (CHEMS).
Health Unlimited.

Key questions

Development agencies, in concert with other institutions, have a responsibility to ensure

that educational opportunities for individuals and communities are engaging and socially
relevant.

Where does culture t in to your/your agencys approach to formal, community and
non-formal education?

What is the language of instruction?

How does the method take account of traditional or culturally based learning styles
and cultural content?

Is it content or process oriented? In what ways is it creative and liberationist?

What cultural forms or methods are used? How is cultural content and expression tapped?
36

Culture, communications and behaviour change

The minds of men are shaped by their whole experience and the most
skilful transmission of material which this experience does not conrm
will fail to communicatethe very failure of so many of the items of
transmission...is not an accident, but the result of a failure to understand
communication.The failure is due to an arrogant preoccupation with
transmission, which rests upon the assumption that the common
answers have been found and need only to be applied. But people will
(damn them, do you say?) only learn by experience and this, normally,
is uneven and slow.
Williams, 1958
During the 1970s, cultural activities like theatre, video, graphic arts and cartoon animation
increasingly featured in the eld activities of development programmes, rediscovering culture
as a process of communication which could, with skilful transmission:affect aspects of activity
and belief, sometimes decisively (Williams, 1993). Projects that used cultural activities to
promote participation and dialogue proved effective, especially among the young and in
non-literate communities (Kidd, 1982). They were fun, promoting easier retention of essential
information (Skuse, 2000), and induced emotional engagement (Aristotle, 350 BCE).
A member of a Reect group
(participatory education
workshop) in the Democratic
Republic of Congo.
Reect/Actionaid.

Until the 1990s IEC (information, education, communication) campaigns were based on the
assumption that accurate information would change attitudes, which in turn would inuence
behaviour. In the 1990s there was a realisation that this assumption was awed as minimal
behaviour change was resulting from these campaigns.
Over time therefore, the term change has been implicitly
shorthanded to behaviour change.The health promotion eld
has been at the forefront of testing new behaviour change
communications (BCC) models as a means of inuencing
knowledge, attitudes and practices (KAP).
It has taken a long time for development planners to recognise
that something is still missing. For example, HIV infection
rates are not diminishing despite the success of IEC/BCC in
producing higher levels of knowledge about transmission and
risk factors. Repeatedly, during the Routemapping research
process researchers came across practitioners experiencing
frustration and a sense of helplessness that their work was not
having an impact on infection rates.
The main problem with the focus on behaviours is that the majority do not occur in isolation;
they occur as a result of social and cultural interactions. If development activities are to
demonstrate change in general and behaviour change in particular, it is imperative that
development planners and practitioners recognise the extent of the inuence of culture in
the establishment and expression of behaviours. It is time for the importance of culture as a
foundation of behaviour to be acknowledged, and for culture to provide the basis for the
change objectives of development.

Box: One of the possible reasons why the ActionAid Stepping

Stones programme (see Case Study page 66) seems to be
so successful is that the programme is not focused on the
behaviour of the individual in isolation from the behaviour
of the rest of the community it does not depend on the
assumption of individual volition, it is constantly seeking
group and community agreement to experiment with change
options, which removes the fear of unpredictability and the
need for resistance to change (see also Box: Behaviour
Change page 38).

37

It is not simply because they dont believe the message that

people do not change their behaviours when they are told it
is in their best interest to do so. They are often not in a position to exercise total control over their behaviour the
cultural context within which they live and inequitable
power relations sometimes challenge individual volition.
The growing use of creative methodologies like radio soap
opera to tap into the underlying cultures of communities
as part of behaviour change programmes indicates that the
connection between cultural context and behaviour change

Participants in Scenarios from

Africa on HIV/AIDS in Burkina
Faso. Global Dialogues.

has been partly recognised by donor agencies. But in the majority of cases that the
Routemapping research studied, there was an expectation by funding providers that the
change would happen over a relatively short period of time. In cases where creative
approaches have delivered a signicant change in behaviour the take up of oral rehydration
solution in Nepal, for example took 12 years to achieve.

Key questions

Development professionals make assumptions about the importance of behaviour change

in development whilst paying little regard to either the constituent elements of behaviour
or the cultural factors that inuence the production of behaviours.

What expectations do you have of cultural projects addressing behaviour change?
What will they deliver, and over what timeframe?

How much attention is paid to the cultural context and other cultural factors which might
inuence behaviour change?

How do you/your agency take account of power relationships and other cultural inuences or
barriers to behaviour change when planning behaviour change communications programmes?

Behavioural change and how it happens

In many development programmes, there is a deeply rooted assumption of a simple
linear relationship between knowledge and behaviour change i.e. tell them what they
need to know (health information, etc.) and a change in behaviour will automatically
follow.The assumption is that behaviour is a simple rather than a complex construct and
fails to recognise that behaviour is inuenced by a multitude of factors many of which
are not readily observable or discernible.
Behaviours are learned, mostly in childhood, as a result of a process (see Figure 1 right)
that combines seeing, hearing, thinking, feeling and doing with a system of rewards and
punishments derived from the norms of the socio-cultural-political environment within
which we nd ourselves growing up.
Many of our behaviours are learned by modelling the behaviours of those around us and
often become habitual things we do without analysing the whys and wherefores. So, for
behaviours to change, the original behaviours need to be unlearned and a set of alternative
behaviours established in place of those original behaviours.The only way to achieve this is
by analysing why we behave the way we do and then determining which elements of the
factors inuencing our behaviours we have both the power and the will to change.
There is also an issue of people liking the world to be predictable.They will often stick with
what they know, putting up with distressing circumstances and even harmful practices in
order to maintain predictability. This is not to deny the fact that people do change their
behaviours if there is sufcient incentive or reason to change (e.g. if things get bad
enough) provided they have the right conditions to enable change. In the majority of
developed, democratically governed countries the assumption of individual volition may
not be completely misplaced. People generally have a degree of freedom of choice and
socio-legal systems to assist their decision to change their circumstances.

38

For example, in a developed country, if a womans situation of domestic violence has

become intolerable because of the risk of abuse to her children, a network of refuges and
the power of the law are available to support her decision to change her circumstances;
behaviours such as drink driving or not wearing seatbelts have been legislated against
and enforcement is effective with the likelihood of being caught and punished being
high, which has had a concomitant effect of lowering the road death toll and the
incidence of drink driving behaviour; a behaviour such as smoking in public spaces is gradually becoming less socially acceptable.
In many less developed, or non-democratically governed countries, there are not the same
social and legal support systems. Therefore, the likelihood of individually determined
behaviour change is greatly diminished and the only route to behaviour change will be
through establishing a safe social environment that is conducive to change by engaging
the whole community, its norms and power structures in the change process.
It is also important to understand that it is possible for people to learn new behaviours
without demonstrating or acting on what they have learned. In the 1960s and 70s, the
psychologist Albert Bandura undertook a series of learning experiments which clearly
showed that whilst learning may occur people will not demonstrate what they have learned
unless the conditions surrounding practice are conducive to the learned behaviour. In other
words, people may know how to change but may not be willingto change their behaviours.
For example, in the Pacic Islands the assumption that teaching people how to build
latrines will lead to improved sanitation habits has been found to be wanting because
the assumption has not allowed for peoples customs and attitudes to be included as a
dynamic component of the development process. Certainly people have learned how to
build latrines and have learned how to use and maintain them but the latrines have gone
unused for years because the peoples cultural attitudes and beliefs towards the behaviours dened as sanitation habits have not changed.
By implication, the seeming failure of some aid programmes stems from the failure of
programme planners to adequately address the role of community or cultural knowledge
and attitudes towards the tangible (or intangible) assets being offered by a programme
that will impact on the peoples willingness to change their behaviours.

Figure 3: Factors inuencing the establishment and expression of behaviours

Behaviours

Often a result of modelling

reinforced by perceived sets
of locally relevant, socially
sanctioned rewards and
punishments

Learned by:
hearing, seeing, thinking,
feeling, doing

All inuenced by the

contexts of:
gender, age, ethnicity,
attitudes, beliefs, social
norms, history, traditions,
culture

39

Learned from:
Parents, teachers, signicant
others, society: i.e. community
leaders, laws, media etc.

SECTION THREE

Working culturally
Explores practical ways of building culture
into policy thinking and into programme
delivery, addresses evaluation and signposts
resource materials.
40

Working culturally in development policy

Institutional cultures

Before it is possible to even start thinking about the role of culture in development policy,
some internal reection is required to dene the consensus on culture within each individual
agency. Institutions may regard culture as a barrier to development, as a soft issue, or as an
important dimension of development.This dominent viewpoint view will pervade the
agencys approach, and inuence its consideration of the cultural dimension of development
from its strategic planning to its grassroots activity.

Recent research in Cambodia found evidence of culture

permeating all aspects of local development practitioners
lives.Cultural perceptions shape the way [they] make sense
of the purpose of the work and the mode of approach
Development theories are based on an alternative world view
that is laden with foreign notions The development
practitioner experiences the pull of two opposing forces
development goals on the one hand, and at the same time
the tension anchoring the practitioner to cultural, traditional
beliefs that is pulling in the opposite direction Capacity
building efforts (in development projects) have largely
ignored the attitudes, beliefs, perceptions and coping
mechanisms of the practitioner and have directly pursued the
provision of training to equip practitioners with the skills and
knowledge to carry out the development project as though
the project existed in a vacuum. (OLeary/ Meas Nee, 2001)

What does the term culture mean in your workplace?

How do you work with culture and at what level(s)
of culture?

Do any strategy documents or programme guidelines refer
to culture? In what way?

How do your local partners or regional/country staff
relate to culture?

Does culture come up in internal discussions and,
if so, how and why?

How does culture affect your beneciaries?

Can you think of any projects which you would describe
as cultural? What did they achieve for the agency?
What did they achieve for beneciaries?

The cultural consensus in the head ofce of an agency may

be different to that found in regional or country ofces, or
among partner agencies. These differences may cause tension and conict, particularly if
local staff feel that they are caught between their local culture(s) and the culture of their
employer or partner agency.
As an example of how to manage this issue, Tearfund has appointed teams of regional
advisors overseas who are country nationals. They are seen as an important mechanism for
bridging the cultural gap between ofcers in the UK and the eld.
FACING PAGE The lotus blossom

and the rabbit, a story of abuse

and redemption enacted by a
Cambodian youth theatre.
Glen Miles/Tearfund.
LEFT Internationally renowned
actor Rasmane Ouedraogo
co-stars in a Scenarios from
Africa lm, written by young
scriptwriter Abdoul-Razakh
Cisse. Global Dialogues.

Strategic planning

We have already dwelt on the need for data to inform policy development in Thinking
Culturally. One of the biggest challenges is the scarcity of comparable data. Without data it
is hard to obtain a clear picture of the relative challenges of different cultural or ethnic
groups in a region or country. The World Bank acknowledges that new dimensions of poverty
analysis are needed which recognise how cultural factors and ethnicity interact with and
affect poverty. Data may well be on its way but it could be some years before it is available.
In the meantime, it is not impossible to compile a rough cultural situation analysis, though
the results are not likely to be complete, comparable or anything more than cursory. Cultural
situation analyses could be presented for discussion as part of regional team meetings or as
part of a broader policy review process. One example is Tearfunds analysis of the impact of
poverty on indigenous groups in Latin America. (See Exploring cultural factors in programme
development, page 44)
The most useful data on culture and ethnic groups appears to be on indigenous people. Since
these often appear to be communities adversely affected by poverty it is possible that an
analysis of country data on indigenous people could provide a partial picture. Local NGOs and
indigenous peoples organisations may be able to corroborate or provide evidence. Some
suggested sources are provided in the Sourcebook at the end of this section.
41

LEFT Indigenous communities in

Chittagong Hill Tracts dene a

cultural approach to gender
rights. Creative Exchange/
Susanna Wilford, 1999.

The World Values Survey has been surveying basic values and
beliefs in more than 65 societies, containing almost 80% of the
worlds population.The surveys collect data in eight areas: IT,
communications and media; consumer behaviour; technology
and mobility; society and culture; political science; economics
and justice; religion, and environment and health. Surveys are
funded and conducted locally, through an international
network of social scientists, with country surveys largely being
conducted by nationals. Findings and interpretations are
shared and analysed internationally and the results updated
and published periodically, most recently in April 2004.The
WVS has had four waves between 1990 and 2001, which have
begun to trace cultural shifts on a regional and global level.
According to the Canadian Council on Social Development
Canadas aboriginal peoples rank 78th in the UNDPs Human
Development Index while Canada is consistently in the top 3.
Almost 52 per cent of aboriginal children were poor, they were
four times more likely to be hungry than non-aboriginal
children, and the disability rate among aboriginal children was
twice the national average.The CCSD has called for a specic
aboriginal anti-poverty strategy. (Anderson, 2003)

Targeting resources

New forms of cultural situation analysis could create some important implications for the
allocation of resources for development, so the process of targeting resources needs to be
informed by some level of understanding of how the cultural dimension affects particular
communities and groups.

While a country or region may appear to have relatively low levels of poverty, individual
communities or groups within them may be particularly adversely affected and require higher
levels of support. Paradoxically, there have been cases where
In 1998 Indian researcher, N. S. Jodha, asked farmers and
traditional poverty assessment has ranked communities
villagers in two villages in Rajastan, India, for their own
as particularly vulnerable to poverty, whereas their own
categories and criteria of changing social, environmental
assessment of their position has been quite different.
and economic status.They named 38 indicators. Comparing
data from his eldwork over 20 years earlier, he found that 36 The principal message here is that the cultural specics of
different regions and communities appear to require greater
households had become more than 5 per cent worse off in per
attention in country planning and resource allocation. This
capita real income.Yet they rated themselves as better off on
has already been noted as a key implication for policy design
37 out of 38 indicators. Indicators that had improved
by the World Bank, which has argued that historical, social
included: quality of housing, wearing shoes regularly, eating
and cultural analysis must be placed on an equal footing with
a third meal a day, and being able to sleep in different rooms
economic analysis (Rao/Walton, 2004).
to animals (New Economics Foundation, 2000).

The UK Department for International Development

established an analytical process at country level to enable
it to better understand the relationship between change and
poverty reduction. Drivers of Change recognised that the one
size ts all approach to policy does not work. It was, in effect,
a process which explored the cultural context in its widest
sense within a country and explored how locally-specic
factors inuenced development outcomes. It undertook 20
country studies exploring how political, social and economic
factors combine to inuence the dynamics of change.The
relationship between these key drivers and ethnicity, religion
and diversity are also explored.

42

Allocating resources
as a donor

Agencies which are donors need to be thinking about how cultural issues affect their grant
giving priorities. Culturally relevant data may highlight imbalances which have cultural or
ethnic causes and affect the target groups they single out for investment.
Pastoralists and hunter-gatherers were identied by Comic Relief as being disadvantaged as a
result of cultural issues: Pastoralists are always on the move and so are physically, as well as
socially, marginalised, explains Head of International Grants, Richard Graham. They live on
the periphery. Other communities often look down on them and mistrust them. There is a
tendency of low education attainment because children do not go to school and therefore
there is low input into policy-making. Fewer donors work with them because they are difcult
to work with, they are often in remote places and are not organised in ways that are as easily
accessible as other community groups.

In assessing which projects to fund, donors will also need to develop a clear picture of how
projects are taking cultural factors into account. They need to understand not only how
culturally-orientated projects achieved their objectives, but how all funded projects have an
impact on cultural issues. Evaluation processes should thereA Comic Relief funded project to dig a well in Malawi and
fore be geared to capture data on cultural impact and feed
locate it closer to a village had an unexpected cultural impact.
that data back into assessing the impact of donor strategy.
Women regretted the new siting of the well because it gave
them less social interaction with other women in collecting
Donors can only develop more culturally sensitive and incluwater from a site further away from the village.
sive approaches to grant-giving if guidelines include cultural
issues.Applicants should be required to demonstrate how their projects are going to impinge
on cultural issues.This implies that they will also have to report back on cultural impact.This,
in turn, will cascade down to how a donor conducts its Monitoring and Evaluation and the
demands it places on applicants to change their Monitoring and Evaluation processes
The European Commission has produced a guiding note on cultural cooperation based on the
criteria in the Lom Convention to enable member countries to adapt programmes to cultural,
social, family and economic factors.
Factors include:
1 Social: ethnic, religious, age and linguistic groups; status, relationships, hierarchies within
groups; distribution of decision-making processes and powers; demographics and mobility
(migration patterns, duration, direction, consequences); basic needs; employment; social
prestige and value criteria.
2 Family: family size and organisation; interpersonal relationships and hierarchies; distribution
of tasks; position/role of women.
3 Economic: forms of ownership, transmission and inheritance; the role of money and the
relationship between wealth/social value; economic activities and agents of production;
principle products and means of production; organisation of work, calendar of workload;
instruments, tools, technologies; trade, transportation, processing and price; income, debt
and savings; consumption, investment, innovation, distribution; access to advice and research.
4 Cultural: professional/general knowledge, literacy, training structures; beliefs, customs, value
systems; taboos; attitudes towards modernisation, attachment to traditional know-how;
typical behaviour (use of leisure time, hospitality, aspirations); relationship to authorities and
institutions; self-organisation, local structures, collective endeavour, innovation processes.
Styled on Change in Continuity, UNESCO.
Resource mapping in
Chittagong, Bangladesh.
Creative Exchange/Susanna
Wilford, 1999.

43

Tearfund: Exploring cultural factors

in programme development
Tear Fund incorporated cultural factors into a recent review of its international programme
priorities affecting Latin America and the Caribbean.
Inspiration has stemmed partly from the agencys theological advisor, Dewi Hughes, who has
highlighted the role of ethnic identity in development. (Hughes, 2003)Culture is part of what
denes ethnic identity development needs to look at both, not in abstract, but in the context
of the local situation. In many situations there may be ways in which culture and ethnic
identity may be part of poverty and the underlying reason for poverty: you have to take it into
account in what you do on the ground, explains Hughes.
Tearfund has a strong historical relationship with indigenous groups, especially in Latin America,
and the cultural impact and sensitivity of its activities is an indicator which it incorporates into
its main programme guidelines.
So when it came to reviewing the agencys international priorities this year as part of a strategic
prioritisation exercise there was a recognition that in some regions particularly Latin America
country-level data on poverty may not be capturing aspects of poverty linked to ethnic or
cultural issues.
As Gordon Davies, Director of the Latin American programme notes:Ethnic groups and indigenous peoples are normally the ones that are most marginalised economically and politically.
So they are among the beneciaries that Tearfund has traditionally had high up its list. The
prioritisation process couldnt accommodate that because it was looking at a country level, so
regional/ethnic imbalances were hidden.
The Latin America team undertook what they describe as a fairly rough exercise drawing
together some comparative data on the aspects of poverty which affected ethnic groups.
Overwhelmingly, this exercise illustrated the disparities in poverty between the majority
population and indigenous/ethnic groups:

More than 80% of indigenous people in Mexico around 8.8 million people - were living
below the poverty line, compared to the national average of 23%.

In Argentina, where a quarter of the majority population live on less than $1 a day, almost
half of the indigenous population were estimated to be below the poverty line.

More than 80% of indigenous people in Guatemala, Nicaragua, Peru and Bolivia were living on
less than $1 a day in countries where, in general, 50% of the population lives below the line.

In Columbia, the Afro-Caribbean population was noted to be the majority of those displaced
by violence; they have twice the level of unsatised basic needs, and infant death rates are
almost 4 times higher than among the rest of the population.
The exercise also served to emphasise the degree to which indigenous and ethnic minorities
were discriminated against: by governments failing to acknowledge their needs, and by being
excluded from legal systems, public services and from decision-making which affects their
lives. This led to a corollary of poor health, high levels of infant mortality, poor education,
unemployment, violence, drug and substance abuse, and family disintegration.
One of the key challenges of this exercise has been the lack of readily available data on
cultural/ethnic imbalances. Tearfunds International Operations Director, Ian Wallace, charged
with leading the process, acknowledges that this data would indeed be helpful but it doesnt
always exist.
Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers in Latin America tend to conceal the imbalance and governments rarely include population gures for indigenous communities, or tended to undercount
them. As Gordon Davies notes: Indigenous people are not a high priority. People ignore them
the resources of development are going to the places where the votes are.
While Tearfund acknowledges that its cultural analysis exercise did not ultimately affect
which countries were prioritised, it has had an impact on the allocation of resources to regional
strategies to address the needs of the poorest.
The agency will now be working on a series of cross-border programmes with partners in
Columbia, Bolivia and Peru and in Nicaragua, Honduras and Guatemala. These will target
indigenous communities across country borders with support for advocacy, leadership, health,
human rights, education and gender programmes.
44

Ethnic Minorities/Indigenous Groups in Latin America and the Caribbean

Reproduced with permission from TearFund
Country

Ethnic Group

National
Population
(millions)

Indigenous
Population
(millions)

Percent of population below poverty line

Argentina

Amerindian (18 peoples / 3.7%)

Largest indigenous groups:
Quechua (1 million), Mapuche (54,000),
Aymara (27,000),Wichi (28,000),
Toba (20,000), Chiriguano (16,000)

37

1.3

25.5 (ofcial)
45
(current
estimate)

Bolivia

Quechua and Aymara (Andean)

6.9

4.9 (71%)

63.0 ?
Urban 52.6

Brazil

Black (11%)
Mulatto (34.4%)
Amerindian (215 tribes / 0.2%)

170.1

0.3 living in
tribes 0.54 in
total (est)

17.4

Chile

Amerindian (9 peoples / 8%)

Roma (gypsies) - 60,000

15.2

1.2

21.6

Colombia

No predominant group
(65 ethno-linguistic groups identied)

30

0.6 (2%)

All

Indig.

Non. Indig.

Urban 64.3
Rural 80.0

Urban 48.1

Colombia (2) Afro-Caribbean population

30

1.5 (5%)

No info

No info

El Salvador

5.5 million

0.4 million

Guatemala

There are at least 21 separate Mayan ethnic

groups, each with its own language:Achi;
Akateko;Awakateko; Chorti; Chuj; Itz; Ixil;
Jaatero; Kaqchkel; K'iche'; Mam; Mopn;
Poqomam; Poqomchi; Q'anjob'al; Q'eqchi';
Sakapulteko; Sirakapense;Tektiteko;Tz'utujil;
and Uspanteko

8.0 million

4.9 million
(61% of
population)

65.60%

86.60%

53.90%

Honduras

There are 7 groups: Miskito;Tawahka; Pech;

Garifuna; Chorti; Lenca; and Xicaque

5.8 million

0.5 million

69.00%

Mexico

By language type: Mexico;Amuzgo; Cachikel; 100.3 million

Chatino; Chichimeca; Chinanteco; Chocho;
Chol; Chontal de Tabasco; Contal de Oaxaca;
Chuj; Cochimi; Cora Cucapa; Cuicateco;
Guarijio; Huasteco; Huave; Huichol; Ixateco;
Ixil; Jacalteco; Kanjobal; Kekchi; Kikapu; Kumiai;
Lacandon; Mame; Mazatlinca; Maya; Mayo;
Mazahua; Mazateco; Mixe; Mixteco;
Motozintleco; Nahuatl; Ocuilteco; Otomi;
Paipai; Pame; Papago; Pima; Pololoca;
Purepechha; Quiche; Seri;Tarhumara;Tepehua;
Tepehuan;Tlapaneco;Tojolabal;Totnaca;Triqui;
Tzeltal;Tzoltil;Yaqui; Zapaoteco; Zoque

30.1 million
(11.0 million
living in Indian
communities)

22.60%

80.60%

17.90%

Nicaragua

The indigenous population live primarily in

4.6 million
the Northern and Southern Autonomous
Atlantic Regions, which constitute 47% of
the national territory.
There are four groups: Miskito; Sumo; Garfuna;
and Rama

0.6 million

50.00%

greater
than 80%

Paraguay

18 groups (mainly in the Chaco area)

6.3 (94% are
0.8
1.4%, including: Chulupe / Nivacleno (13,000), Spanish / Guarani
Lengua (10,000), Pai Tavytera (10,000)
speaking)

21.8

36.8

10.8

Peru

Quechua and Aymara (Andean)

20

9.3 (47%)

53

79

49.7

Uruguay

Charrua Amerindias forcibly absorbed

by Spanish settlers

3.3

0.004

45

Comic Relief: Cultural thinking in action

Richard Graham, Head of Comic Reliefs International Grants Programme, makes the case that
there is an implicit cultural bias in his teams thinking. This permeates their strategic thinking
and affects decision making during the assessment process.When the team is assessing grants
to the programme, Graham says:We will always look at how culturally rooted a project is. One
aspect of that is how local people have fed into the project proposal.We will look at how men
and women will get involved and benet, as gender equality is an important cultural issue. If,
for example, somebody is adapting a western model into an African context we would need
to see how culturally relevant and useful that model was for local communities, and what
adaptations need to be made.
One example is a project to establish a refuge for women suffering abuse in Zimbabwe. Because
of cultural considerations, a network of safe houses was established instead of a refuge (the
model originally proposed). Women could say they were going to a friend or relatives house,
and there was no shame attached.
But, culturally rooted though their thinking may be, if the whole team was moving on, how
would they ensure that these embedded principles would be sustained? Graham says that it
might be appropriate to develop some kind of generic statement to use during the assessment
process. He suggests asking:

How will you make sure that the project is embedded in local peoples culture and values?

If there are embedded traditions which are problematic, what are you going to do to
challenge them?
One indicator of cultural thinking in action in Comic Reliefs Africa Grants programme is its
approach to working with pastoralists and hunter-gatherers. Comic Relief found a culturally
appropriate solution to the issue of education among pastoralists and hunter-gatherers.
There is a system of Koranic instruction where teachers travel with a family for up to 5 years,
instructing children on the Koran.At the end of their instruction period, the teacher would be
paid in livestock and would move on. Comic Relief funded a project which trained Koranic
teachers to also teach reading, writing and arithmetic. It broadened the skills of the Koranic
teachers and gave the children additional skills, while tting in with the pastoralists nomadic
lifestyle and traditional systems of education.
Pastoralists in Ethiopia.
Comic Relief.

46

Sourcebook for
working culturally in
development policy

Central Intelligence Agency The World Factbook is a regularly updated resource which
provides data on a country-by-country basis including main ethnic groups, though not
their relative poverty indicators. www.odci.gov/cia/publications
Centre for Native Lands has maps of Central America and Southern Mexico produced in
partnership with National Geographic and indigenous communities. www.nativelands.org
Centre for World Indigenous Studies has a comprehensive listing (World Wide Web Virtual
Library) of indigenous and Fourth World resources available on its website.
www.cwis.org/wwwvl/indig-vl.html
Cultures, Spirituality and Development,World Faiths Development Dialogue (2001), Oxford.
Culture and Public Action (2004) Ed Vijayendra Rao/Michael Walton,The World Bank,
Washington DC, USA, Stanford University Press, Stanford, California USA.
Indigenous Rights see Fact Sheet www.unhchr.ch/menu6/2/fs9.htm
Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSP) these may
provide some analysis of the impact of poverty on specic
cultural or ethnic groups (as in the case of Nepal). Each
country has its team of experts undertaking poverty
analysis. Some of these may have access to data on the
impact of poverty on specic cultural or ethnic groups.
PRSPs are available from the World Bank website at
www.worldbank.org/poverty/strategies/index.htm.
Recognising Culture (2001) Ed. Matarasso, F. Comedia,
Stroud, UNESCO, Paris,
The Department of Canadian Heritage.
Survival International website offers maps of tribal
communities worldwide, background data and direct links
to sites for tribal communities.
www.survival-international.org/world.htm

Indigenous Communities in
Latin America. Tearfund.

The Cultural Dimension of Development (1995) UNESCO, Paris

UNDP map of Indigenous Peoples (under construction 2004)
www.undp.org/csopp/cso/NewFiles/ipresource.html
UNESCO Local and Indigenous Knowledge Systems (LINKS) intersectoral website
http://portal.unesco.org/sc_nat/ev.php?URL_ID=1945&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_
SECTION=201
UNESCO Declaration on Cultural Diversity (2002) document for the World Summit on
sustainable Development, UNESCO Paris.
UNESCO Institute of Statistics is developing a new country proles section containing
data on education, culture and communication www.uis.unesco.org
UNESCO mapping reports on indigenous knowledge from homepage www.unesco.org
follow links for Culture, then Special Focus, Indigenous Knowledge, Indigenous Peoples
Website, Projects.
http://portal.unesco.org/culture/admin/ev.php?URL_ID=2946&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_
SECTION=201&reload=1064527586
UNESCO Atlas of World Languages in danger of disappearing
http://portal.unesco.org/en/ev.php-URL_ID=3264&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_
SECTION=201.html
World Values Survey http://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/
World Bank Culture and Poverty website: follow links to PovertyNet website by selecting
the theme poverty from the list at http://www.worldbank.org/html/extdr/thematic.htm.
Under topics menu select Culture and Poverty for a range of materials.

47

Working culturally in development programmes

and eld work
Planning, implementation and management
The Levels model explained in How Culture Works in Development (Section One) has particular
implications for programme development and eld work. At the outset of any project it is
important to develop a clear idea at what level culture will connect with the process.

Will the project be considering the cultural context?

Will it support, reect or challenge specic aspects of a culture? What are the ethical

considerations of this?

How will it engage with cultural content will it draw on particular content such as

local languages, art forms or rituals?

If it is using creative methods, which form will be appropriate for the audience?

Will a process or tool/message-based approach be used?
Most development workers make assumptions about culture
they should be required to make their assumptions explicit
in proposals, action plans and project reports,said one
respondent in the Routemapping Culture and Development
research.There is not enough consideration given to the
explicit intent to use culture,said another respondent in
Thailand.Most projects are probably doing something but it
is not planned or systematic, probably being done as part of
participatory processes so the relevance, rationale,
aims/objectives with respect to culture are not made explicit.
(Routemapping research process).

Will there be scope for creative expression, and if so,

whose expression? What will be expressed and why?

It seems a basic prerequisite of all development programmes
and projects, regardless of their content or subject matter,
that they should take into consideration the cultural context
in which they are operating. Few in the development sector
would argue with this assertion, but there are not many
indications that this is currently happening.

Every programme or project requires an element of research

and development on local conditions; so there is plenty of
opportunity for the cultural dimension to be incorporated,
for assessment processes to ask what the cultural implications are, and for monitoring and
evaluation to consider the cultural impact. The processes which exist to plan, manage and
assess programmes and projects simply need to be seen through a cultural lens.
Some examples of how this can be achieved are given below:

Respecting the cultural context

Reect/Action Aid.

UNFPA has been careful to work with cultural and religious

leaders in addressing harmful practices such as female
genital cutting. Through a project entitled REACH they
worked with 300 elders in 161 Sabiny clans in Uganda to
explore reproductive health. The process they established
reinforced and supported traditional cultural structures
and preserved cultural dignity. Annual culture days were
introduced to promote local customs and traditions and
attention was paid to providing alternative cultural roles
and sources of income for those who were performing the
practice. After 15 months cutting had been reduced by 36
per cent. (UNFPA, 2004)

Drawing on cultural content

A Creative Exchange project in Chittagong Hill Tracts,
Bangladesh, in 1999 drew on indigenous cultural traditions
of the three local primary ethnic groups to explore human
rights challenges facing women and girl children. It looked at
positive and negative rights messages in traditional stories,
songs and games, and found ways of working with these
resources to promote community dialogue and awareness
of gender equality. One of the results was the retelling of a
traditional story of a warrior king from his wifes perspective.
(Creative Exchange, 2000)

48

Pots in Malawi. Story

Workshop Educational Trust.

Using a cultural method

A series of radio programmes was developed to promote
civic education and voter awareness in Tanzania in the run up
to its rst multi-party local and national elections in 1994
and 1995. Programmes reached almost 2 million people and
included a regular radio drama, the re-telling of popular
animal fables and dramatic monologues by Mama Amani
promoting womens participation. The radio drama was
extended into short playlets touring villages to promote
local participation and debate. (Gould, 1999)
Filming in Bukina Faso.
Global Dialogues.

Working with cultural expression

Comic Relief funded Adugna Community Dance Theatre in
Ethiopia. Adugna deliberately chose to work with contemporary European dance in its work of capacity-building and
developing the skills of young street children in Addis
Ababa. It was felt that traditional dance did not present
opportunities to demonstrate gender equality: through
contemporary dance, men and women performers could
work and perform alongside each other in ways which
physically demonstrated and actually achieved equal
respect and input. (See case study page 61)

Adugna Potentials.
Rosa Verhoeve.

Partnerships

Many development agencies do not have the specialist skills for cultural projects. Partnership
with agencies that do both individuals and organisations is often essential for delivery of
programmes. A strong partnership with a good match of skills, values and expectations is
regarded as an important prerequisite by culture and
It is often assumed that because practitioners work in the
development practitioners (Gould 2004). The right local
cultural sector they can provide services free or at a cheaper
partners can also provide important cultural grounding and
rate than other development practitioners.This eld often
connections which can improve sustainability. Ensuring
requires specialist skills and knowledge which should not be
partners are competent is an important aspect of risk
exploited and should be regarded as being of equivalent value
management and ensures the protection of beneciaries, too.
to human rights or gender specialists for example. Recent
informal research among UK practitioners found that the
There are some talented cultural practitioners who are
going rate for project and consultancy work was between
skilled at working in both development and in mainstream
250 and 300 per day.
arts. Some cultural practitioners specialise only in working in
the development sector. For many artists in developing countries, the development sector
has become an important means of earning a living. However, it does not always follow that
any artist will have an innate understanding of how to work in development situations. The
work does require a degree of familiarity with the expectations of development agencies; a
level of skill in working with communities sensitively and effectively; and the values of the
artist need to be aligned towards achieving social change in partnership with a community,
rather than achieving their artistic vision in a community.
The case studies on pages 6075 give some illustrations of the partnerships which have evolved.
Olga Kiswendsida Ouedraogo,
on the set of the lm No Time to
Drop your Guard, which she
co-directed for Scenarios from
Africa. Global Dialogues.

49

Funding and
resources

Funding and resources will dictate what can be achieved, within what timescale and the level
of evaluation and follow-up activity. The Routemapping Culture and Development research
found evidence of unrealistic expectations of what cultural projects can deliver, and over
what timeframe they can be effective. Further thinking is required about the purpose and
expectations of cultural projects and how far resources can take a project. If there is only
sufcient funding for a 12-week project then it will not achieve the same impact as a
multi-million pound investment over eight or ten years.
A key aspect of resourcing is ensuring that local staff and, if necessary, regional teams are
adequately prepared to manage projects which are specically using a cultural method or
working expressively. Some development agencies which are regularly working with cultural
projects have started contracting arts managers with skills in the community/development
sector to manage these projects. Others have provided training projects which develop the
skills and capacities of several local partners or NGOs to work with these methodologies
effectively. Some training courses are available for development practitioners wishing to
develop skills in these areas, but most are 12-month or three-year academic courses.

How far does the money go?

A single drama about HIV/AIDS prevention cannot, in isolation, be expected to guarantee
increased condom use in a community because this requires behaviour change. But it
might prove valuable in engaging the target group in dialogue which informs donors of
attitudes to condom use and can inuence HIV/AIDS prevention strategy. A short-term
local project such as this might cost as little as 3,000.
A UNICEF project using cultural content and methods prayer cards, printed cloth,
popular media, music, football to promote awareness of oral rehydration solution in
Nepal slashed the death rate of children under ve by more than half, but this change
took place over 12 years. This project cost around 200,000 over four years in 1986
costs may have risen to around 500,000 today.
Radio soap operas vary in cost and scale. A small regional production would cost around
250,000-300,000 annually; a larger pan-regional production might cost well over
500,000 a year. Costs would be dependent on airtime charges, if any, and local variables
such as human resource costs.
Young participants with
disabilities in a workshop with
Adugna Potentials, part of the
Ethiopian Gemini Programme.
Rosa Verhoeve, 2003.

50

Implementation

Different cultural contexts will inuence the way the same project is delivered in two
different communities. It is therefore important to have an understanding of the local
cultural context prior to implementation. Communities may have different concepts of time,
a variation in seasonal labour patterns, or different hierarchies. Flexibility in implementation
is required to accommodate local ways of doing things.

Many peoples in sub-Saharan Africa see time in quite a

different way. In the past time was held to be one of the
components of life. Pastoral people organised time on a
seasonal basis and on a daily basis.This perception of time led
to different forms of organisation with a less rigid breakdown
of time than the minutes, hours, months and years found in
western culture. In industrialised countries events do not
interrupt the continuity of time. In [some parts of] Africa,
however, when nothing happens time is suspended.There
are different types of time: natures time, which ows on with
almost no interruption and human time which stops and
starts depending on what people do.(Zavackowski, 1985)

A second issue to consider, particularly where cultural methods

and expressive approaches are being used, is whether the
medium and the process are appropriate for the audience.
There have been occasions where the impact of a project was
spoiled because of an inappropriate cultural approach.

A drama project in Tonga which was supposed to explore

reproductive health issues generated resistance because
discussion of sex was taboo among certain sections of
the community a public medium such as drama was
not appropriate for the subject matter except with
segregated groups.
A traditional western diagram of the female reproductive
organs had to be revised in Zimbabwe because cultural project
workers in a family planning clinic found that the community
did not understand it.
Audience for live shows of
Urunana Well Women Media
Project in Rwanda.
Health Unlimited.

Risk assessment

How have risks and threats been assessed? Culture is a very dynamic medium to work with,
but it can often lead to unexpected results. One insurance policy is good planning and
dialogue with local partners who can foresee any dangers which might arise and help diffuse
tensions if they occur.

A Finnish initiative used participatory video as part of

community-based learning in East Africa. Local people
complained quite outspokenly about government institutions.
In some cases this helped engender mutual understanding.
But in some cases community groups came into conict with
government representatives over a management plan for a
tract of indigenous land.Authorities rejected the authenticity
of the views in the video and banned it from being shown.
A theatre project addressing safe environments for girl
children in schools led to an uproar among teachers when
allegations of abuse of girl students at a school were made
during a public interactive play presented by the children.The
agency involved was left in a difcult situation - on the one
hand it agreed to apologise about the public naming of the
school; but on the other hand it refused to apologise for the
fact that the children had raised the issue, as it did not wish to
undermine them if the abuse allegations were well founded.

51

The competence, experience and integrity of the eld workers

is another important safety mechanism, as are monitoring
and evaluation. A key issue is whether the agency has a clear
idea of what is being said or done in its name. In one case a
circus project working with street children in North Africa,
supported by several major development agencies, was found
to have been inltrated by paedophiles.

Living Statues as part of a

training on child welfare.
Tearfund.

Sourcebook for
planning,
implementation and
management

Adding Value Overseas (2004), Creative Exchange, London:

www.creativexchange.org/html/library/AVO_Map_.pdf
Change in Continuity Concepts and tools for a cultural approach to development (2000),
UNESCO Publishing, Paris. ISBN 92 3 103491 X
Communication and Power Manual (2003), David Archer/Kate Newman,Actionaid, London.
Health on Air (1998), Gordon Adam/Nicky Harford, Health Unlimited, London.
Participatory Video (1997), Jackie Shaw/Clive Robertson (1997), Routledge, London.
Performance and Participation (1997), PLA Notes Issue 29, International Institute for
Environment and Development, London. Email: pla.notes@iied.org
Source an online database of English language publications, reference materials and
contacts on a wide variety of health and development issues.Web: www.asksource.info/

52

How to monitor and evaluate the cultural dimension

The Routemapping research indicated that considerable challenges were posed with monitoring
and evaluation. Because culture is invisible, cultural projects (especially where they are subsumed
into larger non-cultural projects) are not generally evaluated; even where they are evaluated
their results are not always valued and acted upon. There was
We have tried a number of different ways but none are really
little evidence of how and why successful projects were consatisfactory for evaluating creative impacts, says Ato Mesn,
tributing to development agency targets, or of how beneciary
Coordinator of the Gemini Youth Programme in Ethiopia.We
feedback was being used to improve organisational performhave no problem saying that we have successfully provided
ance and learning.
new skills to x-number of young people but community impact
The Routemapping research found that there was an absence
is another matter, if we are referring to the question of
of basic information at eld level about what monitoring
behaviour change.
and evaluation means. Background information has been
provided on page 58 to clarify this issue for project workers.
Social indicators are not necessarily relevant within the time
frame of a project but maybe we can look at what happened
in communities before and after our interventions, or we can
look for themes in the feedback that we get from audience
members to nd out what effect the intervention has had on
the way they talk about issues.

But there are also some very real challenges with monitoring
and evaluating cultural projects, which stem from the fact that
they often generate multiple impacts, which are not
always easy to capture, and which take time and resources
which are not always made available to cultural projects.
Agency staff at country level were struggling to identify
Awareness-raising is a realistic objective of cultural activities
appropriate forms of evaluation or impact assessment.
but behaviour change may not be a realistic objective and if
Scientic and economic impact models fail to capture
we fail to provide evidence of behaviour change then cultural
important qualitative impacts which are specic to cultural
activities will be seen as a failure and marginalised by the
processes and activities and which can ow from the very
development donors. (Routemapping research process)
human responses at an individual, family/group, organisation
and community level to a cultural stimulus. As indicated in
Thinking Culturally (Section Two), an undue emphasis on seeking behaviour change can put
pressure on projects to adopt monitoring and evaluation processes which are not always
appropriate and lead to unrealistic expectations.
There is added confusion concerning the beneciaries of culture projects. Often, especially in
projects that are participatory, there are two quite distinct sets of beneciaries: those who
participate in the project actively, and those who might witness or experience the results of a
project as a member of an audience or through community outreach. An example might be
a theatre for development project working with a group of beneciaries, such as women,
to develop a participatory drama performance educating the wider community about a
particular issue, such as the right for women to vote. In some evaluation models, the
audience/community is seen as the beneciary; in others the group of immediate participants is
seen as the beneciary.Where monitoring and evaluation is failing to capture one dimension of
this beneciary impact, it may be missing out on some important results.
The Adugna/Gem TV project in Ethiopia started as a capacity
building process to train young people who were working on
the streets of Addis Ababa in dance and video-making skills.
Having established a successful group of dancers and videomakers, the project has moved on to working with dance with
a variety of community beneciaries from the police to
disabled young people and to making social documentaries
which capture development challenges. It has not always been
easy for the donors to see how training a group of dancers and
video-makers will deliver on development objectives.And yet,
10 years on,Adugna and Gem are having an impact on their
community and wider society: a young disabled girl has
developed new condence, skills and well-being through
dance, which in turn has had a profound effect on her family;
a group of parliamentarians watched a documentary on the
effects of early marriage and agreed to legislate on it. For more
information see the case study, page 61.
Participant from Adugna
Potentials Ethiopia.
Rosa Verhoeve, 2003.

53

Establishing
indicators

A primary consideration is outcomes or impacts that can realistically be expected from a

cultural project and how they can be measured. For each topic being dealt with using cultural
approaches, careful consideration must be given to what changes (as outcomes or impacts)
can realistically be expected, how they can be measured, and within what time frame.

A realistic outcome indicator of a successful drama

presentation on safe sex might be increased levels of knowledge
or awareness about means of avoiding sexually transmitted
infections but it would be unrealistic to expect the drama group
to demonstrate increased use of condoms as a direct result of
the drama presentation; or an impact indicator of successful
family planning messages might be reduction in average family
size but even trends in this indicator would not be available for a
number of years, that is, not within the one-to-three year time
frame of many community development projects.

The widely held belief that all development activities must be

able to demonstrate change which is implicitly assumed to
mean behaviour change, unnecessarily narrows the focus of
evaluation of many culturally based interventions or activities.
Much of the evidence for behaviour change can only be
surmised from the accumulation (over time or across projects)
of qualitative information about intangible outcomes, or inferred from long-term social indicators which go way beyond
the remit, timeframe or realistic goals of cultural projects.

Behaviour change can, in fact, be the hardest level of

change to achieve, especially within a limited time frame.
This is because of the complexity of factors that contribute to the production of behaviours
(see Behaviour change and how it happens, page 38). Although behaviour change is assumed
to be an ideal outcome it is not the only legitimate goal of a
A study of the Social Impact of Participation in Arts Projects by
project using cultural approaches (particularly culture as
the cultural research agency, Comedia, in 1996-1997
content, method and/or expression). Other legitimate and
illustrated short-term growth in individual capacity in several
strategic targets include a range of constituent elements of
areas: 79% of those surveyed had learned new skills; 49% had
behaviour, i.e. knowledge, skills, awareness, attitudes, beliefs,
helped to plan what happened; 87% became interested in
emotions and interpersonal relationships.
something new; 56% learned about other cultures; 54% went
Although it might reasonably be hoped that a culturally
to new places; 34% decided to do some training or course;
based programme will lead to changes in knowledge, skills or
53% became keen to help in local projects; 48% felt better or
awareness, it cannot be assumed these changes will
heathier; 77% felt happier.All these could be seen as
automatically translate into behaviour changes.
precursors of wider social changes which may have emerged
had longer-term impacts been monitored (Matarasso, 1996).

Designing an
evaluation
framework

While there is general acknowledgement by agency staff that evaluation of cultural

approaches to development is required, there is very little consensus about what should be
evaluated, how and by whom. There are also gaps in eld-level understanding of how
monitoring and evaluation apply to cultural projects.

Several development agency eld ofcers interviewed during the Routemapping research
shared the view that evaluation of cultural projects was not given sufcient importance by
donors. Field staff expressed some frustration at the lack of
Staff at Save the Children UK, Nepal ofce, commented:
appropriate models for evaluating cultural projects and the
Culture/creative activities are seen basically as a tool or
pre-eminence of the behaviour change paradigm.
medium to aid process development, to date they havent
been viewed as a process within themselves that need to be
monitored and their impact evaluated how would you
evaluate their impact anyway? It is not something we have
addressed. (Routemapping research process.)

Save the Children UK.

54

Setting indicators in
Chittagong, Bangladesh.
Creative Exchange/Susanna
Wilford.

There is the question of how to incorporate the different levels of culture into an evaluation
framework, as different levels of culture require consideration at different points within the
evaluation framework:
Cultural context development programmes and projects need to understand their cultural
context and how their project activities can affect the cultural context.
Cultural content it is important to understand how and why particular cultural content is
being used, the effect of drawing on that content, and whether there is any reciprocal effect
on the content.
Cultural methods evaluation processes need to monitor the quality of interventions as well as
their relative effectiveness as a channel for working with individuals, groups and communities; due to the dynamic nature of much cultural work this must be a reective on-the-job
learning process.There is a limited amount that external evaluation can achieve.
Cultural expression you cannot judge the quality of an expression by numbers. It can only be
judged by its impact on others: how it makes them feel and what response it provokes. If a project
has resonance and meaning for a community or group, it is likely to have a greater impact
For any project it is necessary to rst determine who will be interested in the information
gathered and why.

A donor may want information to show the numbers of disadvantaged people whose
development it is inuencing or to simply demonstrate that a project is on track;

An agency head ofce may want to feed the information into programme and policy
decision-making structures and processes;

Local project partners or institutions may want information for the purposes of advocacy,
local policy development or to guide legislation reforms;

Project managers might use the information for monitoring and implementation amendment
or project re-alignment;

Participants may be looking for feedback for personal and professional learning purposes;

Beneciaries may be looking for evidence of improvements in their quality of life.
(Routemapping research process.)
An evaluation framework for a project adopting a cultural approach must allow for all of the
possible requirements listed above. Because of the often highly participatory and dynamic
nature of cultural projects there is a need for continuous evaluation by project staff, through
a systematic feedback process in such a way so that lessons are learned and applied throughout the life of the project.
A drama project addressing the rights of girl children by the
London-based Pan Centre for Intercultural Arts in Ahmedabad,
Gujurat, India, developed a monitoring method which involved
project workers attending tea shops and listening/
participating in the informal discussions about the project
and the changes it had stimulated. During one such informal
discussion it emerged that a member of the community had
stopped beating his daughter.

55

Evaluation for cultural projects should not rely on end-ofphase assessments conducted by external evaluators. Not
only is external evaluation often expensive to fund, and
funding for evaluation difcult to secure, but it would miss
most of the important action in the project process which
requires constant observation and reection and ensures the
project is open to realignment. An evaluation that is an
afterthought is a wasted opportunity.

The evaluation framework on page 59 (gure 4) was used for an Awareness Community
Theatre project in the Pacic. This framework indicates the points at which the levels of
culture inuence the design of an evaluation framework and, when read in conjunction with the
information on data sources provided in the box on Monitoring and evaluation, might help to
provide insight into potential content of monitoring (process) and evaluation (effectiveness)
data that could be incorporated into agency management systems to help guide changes or
improvements in programme implementation as well as future agency planning with respect to
cultural approaches. It also demonstrates the relative place of behaviour in the wide -ranging
repertoire of equally legitimate and relevant data that can be collected and reported from
cultural approaches. Importantly, the framework shows the points at which data can be
collected from individuals, groups and the community.This can illustrate the wider benets that
ow from cultural projects.
One of the major differences between cultural and non-cultural projects and their evaluation
can be seen in the diagram with its provision for feedback on both the quality of the cultural
performance/product and its social relevance/resonance. The former can be used by participants for personal and professional learning purposes and the latter can provide evidence
that the cultural approach is engaging beneciaries in the development process rather than
assigning to them the role of recipients of development activities.

Agency use of
evaluation data

The Routemapping research illustrated that there was a gap between monitoring and
evaluation in the eld and feeding these results into policy and programme assessment.

Even where agencies do consider the cultural dimension of development as a priority, there
is limited collection of data which can illustrate how progress is being made against this
priority and therefore limited scope to translate that data
Tearfunds main programme guidelines ask applicants to
into learning for the agency.
consider what impact their project would have on cultural
sensitivity, cultural diversity and cultural transformation.
Assessment processes may need to be adjusted to capture this
The agency is now exploring how projects can demonstrate
data.There is a need to understand at the outset what data on
through impact assessment that they have been culturally
cultural projects and their impacts would signify success or
sensitive, have supported cultural diversity and brought about
effectiveness in terms of the agencys goals or priorities.
cultural transformation within local communities.
Internal or external evaluation processes may also need
attention to ensure the cultural dimension is not lost. EvaluTearfund distributes a blue card for all regional local teams
ators may not be aware that they are expected to report on
and in evaluation consultants brieng packs which contains
the cultural dimension of impact, or even aware that the
ten core principles of the agency (including cultural
success of a cultural method may be signicant.
sensitivity) which raise awareness of the issues to be taken into
account in assessment.
Like most agencies, Comic Relief does not ask partners and
grant recipients to evaluate their work in a particular way
which takes culture into account. It is important that
evaluations are owned by local people and that can often lead
to a variable standard in the way evaluation is carried out.
Comic Relief has found that it may be necessary to draw upon
specialist expertise in evaluating and monitoring outcomes of
cultural projects.

Participants in child rights

project Ahmedabad, India.
John Martin, Pan Centre for
Intercultural Arts.

56

Participants in Ahmedabad,
India. John Martin, Pan Centre
for Intercultural Arts.

Tracking cultural
impact data

A basic but rather profound challenge to tracking cultural impact data is the absence of
cultural key words in the databases of development agencies, which would enable agencies
to track projects of a cultural nature and assess how they are contributing to the agencies
goals. Frequently, cultural projects can only be tracked through organisational memory.
As databases tend to be classied according to strategic or policy objectives, it is difcult to
include cultural projects under primary database criteria, unless one of these criteria happens
to be cultural, but there may be scope for inclusion under sub-objectives or thematic headings.
The inclusion of a cultural keyword, or the electronic tagging of cultural projects should be
considered in future database upgrades in development agencies.

Sourcebook for
monitoring,
evaluation and agency
use of evaluation data

UNAIDS (2002), National AIDS Councils Monitoring and Evaluation Operations Manual,
UNAIDS, Geneva.
Archer, D. and Cottingham, S. (1996). The REFLECT Mother Manual:A new approach to
literacy London:ActionAid.
Archer, D. and Newman, K. (2003). Communication and Power London:ActionAid.
Fowler,A., Goold, L. and James, R. (1995). Participatory self assessment of NGO capacity
Oxford: INTRAC.
Gosling, L. and Edwards, M., (2003). Toolkits:A practical guide to planning, monitoring,
evaluation and impact assessment London: Save the Children.
Hope,A. and Timmel, S. (1999). Training for transformation:A handbook for community
workers (Books 1-4) London: Intermediate Technology Publications.
McGillivray,A.Weston, C. and Unsworth, C. Communities Count! A Step-by-step guide to
community sustainability indicators (1998), New Economics Foundation, London.
Pretty, J.N., Gujit, I., Scoones, I. and Thompson, J. (1995). A Trainers Guide for Participatory
Learning and Action London: IIED.
Soul City evaluations http://www.soulcity.org.za/ follow links for Evaluations
section of website.
Welbourn,A. (2002). Stepping Stones:A training package on HIV/AIDS, communication and
relationship skills London:ActionAid.
Williams, D. How the arts measure up:Australian research into social impact,
(1997), Stroud, Comedia.
Matarasso, M. Dening Values: Questions of evaluation in the arts (1996) Stroud, Comedia.

57

What is monitoring and evaluation?

Confusion between monitoring and evaluation is common.There is a
simple distinction between monitoring and evaluation that may be
helpful. Monitoring is the routine, daily assessment of ongoing activities
and progress. In contrast, evaluation is the episodic assessment of overall
achievements. Monitoring looks at what is being done, whereas evaluation
examines what has been achieved or what impact has been made
(UNAIDS, 2002)
Although monitoring and evaluation, as referred to in development literature, are indeed
different concepts, it is probably more helpful to describe them in terms of their constituent
parts i.e. inputs, outputs, outcomes and impacts (see Figure 4).
Inputs and outputs are associated with monitoring the effort or process of project planning
and implementation. Outcomes and impacts are associated with the effectiveness of project
activities in meeting the aims and objectives of any individual project and/or longer-term
development objectives (such as those embodied in the Millennium Development Goals).
Monitoring (also referred to as process evaluation) focuses on the basic reporting of facts regarding:
a Inputs refers to the resources available and how they are used: for example, staff, funds, facilities and supplies; types and
amount of training; number of cultural/creative products or projects designed and developed; number of requests
received for products/projects.
Sources of data: project/organisational records.
b Outputs are the quantiable items resulting from a project including clients served and the range of services provided: for
example; the number of people who participated or were trained; audience gures for performances or broadcasts; number
of products/performances or projects produced; range and content of knowledge and skills transmitted; networking
activities which extended the scope of the project.
Sources of data: attendance/audience gures, participants list, project management record, newspaper/web articles,
representation at events/conferences/workshops.
Evaluations (i.e. effectiveness evaluations) focus on short and long-term changes:
a Outcomes are the short-term effects within the locality, which might include: an increase in knowledge and skills, changes
in attitudes, beliefs, emotions, relationships, behaviours or other locally dened quality of life indicators linked to project
objectives. Changes can be recorded at individual, group (family/organisation) and community level.
Sources of data: before and after event/project questionnaires, formal or informal post-event discussions with audiences,
project/video diaries (kept by participants), video interviews, comment walls, visual exercises or any number of well
documented Participatory Learning and Action (PLA) techniques, and formal or informal knowledge, attitudes and
practices (KAP) questionnaires or surveys
b Impacts are long-term changes recorded through social and cultural indicators. Impact might occur in a range of dimensions
personal, family/group or community. Personal changes might have a wider effect on the individuals family or group,
and this in turn might inuence the wider community. Changes might include health, social capital, environmental
improvements, services available to communities, adaptations to traditional ways of behaving. For example: individual
skill/condence attainment, family income levels resulting from improved skill, wider community take-up of programme;
or, knowledge retention by individual, better family health, decline in child and maternal mortality.
Sources of data: before and after event/project community surveying (formal or informal, using PLA techniques), periodic
observational visits, literacy rates, family income levels, infant/maternal mortality, HIV infection rates, time-series studies
recording changes in behaviour, take-up of traditional practices.
The difference between monitoring (process) and evaluation (effectiveness) levels of evaluation is not recognised by
many donors, who ask for details of outputs and outcomes as if they were interchangeable concepts.When an evaluation
is associated with a project that focuses on infrastructure development (such as water supply provision), these two levels
of evaluation may become synonymous. But, where the focus of a project is human or social development through an
activity intended to increase community awareness and/or change behaviours, then the lack of differentiation can lead to
unrealistic expectations.

58

59

Agency

Donor

Audience/consumer
or community
beneciaries

Cultural performance
or product

(Group or individual
participants and/or
beneciaries.)
Cultural content,
methods and
expression utilised

Activity

Objectives

Aims

Project

Longer term

Short to medium term

b) Social
relevance/resonance

a) Quality of
performance/product

Feedback on:

Community action and other social

and cultural indicators (including
impacts on cultural context and
content.)

Impacts

Changes in knowledge, skills,

attitudes, beliefs, emotions,
relationships, behaviours
at individual and/or
community level

Outcomes

Services provided
Staff trained Clients served
Cultural products created or
events staged
Knowledge and skills transferred.

Outputs

Resources (including cultural

context and content)
Staff
Funds
Facilities Supplies Training

Inputs

Figure 4: Potential framework for planning appropriate levels of evaluation of cultural approaches to development

Evaluation, ie,
Effectiveness evaluation

Monitoring or process
evaluation

EVALUATION

SECTION FOUR

Case studies

60

1 Adugna Community Dance Theatre and GemTV (Comic Relief)

Country/region
Agency

Project Focus

Ethiopia
Ethiopia Gemini Trust

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 lm techniques, which has
led to the establishment of the Adugna Community Theatre Dance group and the video
production house GemTV in Addis Ababa.
Background
In 1995 UK lm maker Andrew Coggins was planning to
make a lm about Ethiopian street children. He convinced
community dance practitioner Royston Muldoom to visit
Ethiopia and create a performance to raise consciousness
about the plight of street children. More than 100 street
children were involved in the performance. The British
Ambassador asked the group to perform as part of the British
Embassys 1996 centenary celebrations. Muldoom returned
to produce a piece about the lives of the children themselves,
which was performed to 250,000 people in Addis Ababa. The
seed was sown for a project to offer dance training to 18
street children and video production training to another 12
street children.
Level of cultural intervention:
Culture as content (contemporary western dance used to
promote positive gender images, African dance, video stories
depicting or dramatising implications of cultural practices
or traditions)
Culture as method (dance/drama/video) combination of
process and tool-based depending on situation and denition
of participants/beneciaries

ABOVE AND LEFT Adugna in action.

Rosa Verhoeve, 2003.

Activities
Work with original beneciaries
The aim was for the lm makers to be trained to articulate their lives from the inside and the
dancers to raise public awareness about the vulnerability of street children. The project was
envisaged as an 18-month programme but ran for ve years. Training for Adugna centred on
training in contemporary Western and traditional Ethiopian dance, and arts management and
production, and for GemTV in video development and production.There were classes in English,
maths, computer and administrative skills, social and other community development skills.
Work with past beneciaries
A partnership between Adugna and the Ethiopian Police enabled creative activities to be
introduced as part of police training between 1998 and 2001 focussing on human rights and
the characteristics of open and accountable policing. This work was conducted at the
National Police Training College and was extended to the Tigrai and Amhara regions, where
over 1,000 police participated. A dance performance and interactive drama were devised
reecting a Day in the Life of the Police Station. The drama featured various situations
typically encountered by police (sexist attitudes to women police ofcers, violence against
prostitutes, domestic violence, violence in a bar etc) portraying negative police responses.
Feedback from discussion groups were subsequently shared and used to portray a policing
style more conducive to democratic governance and social justice.
In 2001 Gem TV created Another Kind of Life, a lm on abduction, rape and forced marriage of
girl children. It was produced to encourage local community discussion in the region of
Ethiopia in which the lm is set (83% of all girls in the region are said to have been abducted.)

61

Work with current beneciaries

Adugna is now also teaching other young people they hold a class for the Gemini kindergarten
group; have set up a Junior Adugna class; run a class/group (Alert) in collaboration with Adugna
Potentials (an integrated dance group of Adugna and a group of young people with disabilities);
undertake outreach work with children with physical and learning disabilities; they provide
outreach training in dance and forum theatre to Anti-Aids clubs in Addis Ababa districts.
In 2002, GemTV worked in collaboration with the Afar Pastoralists Development Association
to produce a lm focusing on the effect of the unequal burden of work on womens health
and mortality.
Austrian Development Corporation commissioned a lm, Cutting Edge, addressing female genital
mutilation (FGM), which involved affected communities in script development and acting.

Outcomes

28 of the original 30 young people are still participating (now as professionals rather than
trainees) in the Adugna and Gem TV.

Both groups graduated with City and Guilds diplomas

Adugna has been commended by UN Secretary General Ko Annan who saw them
perform at the African Development Forum Concert of African Artistes, broadcast live
on Ethiopian television.

Adugna dancers have collaborated with other African and European artists and performed
at international festivals

Adugna members worked on a pilot project to create a set of activities addressing gender
issues, early forced marriage, and HIV/AIDS.

Another Kind of Life was shown as part of UNICEFs Say Yes Campaign for Children at the
World Summit on Children at the UN General Assembly, and as part of Womankind Report at
a UN conference in New York to illustrate the power of video in grassroots community change.

Another Kind of Life shown at a workshop in the Ethiopian Parliament in 2003.After the lm
was shown, the Ethiopian Parliament agreed that it was time to legislate against the practice
of child abduction and forced marriage.

Beneciary feedback
(observed)

Original beneciaries:
Dance has changed my life, before I had shame and nothing to do. But now I work with
people with disabilities. Most people think people with disabilities cant do anything but they
are very surprised when they see how well they can move, how much they have to offer.
(Addisu Demmissie,Adugna)
I was 15 years old when I joined Adugna. Before that I spent time on the street. I had no work
or education. Because of that I got upset and thought about smoking, drinking, stealing and
other bad things. Before I joined Adugna I thought of myself as a useless person but now
I think of myself as a hopeful person. I have changed physically, socially and mentally. I
learned a lot more than I expected in all aspects of my life. I would like to change the life of
street children and work with the many poor children in my country.When we come to dance
whats really nice is that we are teaching them through enjoyment so they learn and dont
stop listening or learning because they enjoy themselves.Youre not just teaching them about
HIV or something else, youre showing them its about life. Most young people want to talk,
they want to move, so with our work they can do that and learn (Mekbul Jemal,Adugna)
Contemporary dance gives me freedom to be myself and equal with the male members of the
company. Dance has changed my life. I used to sell things on the street but now I teach other
people about important issues. Dance has changed the way I think.. My family didnt like me
doing contemporary dance and told me to leave home but I said: No, I will stay at home and
I will dance, because dance has changed my life and lets me help others to change the way
they think. (Meseret Yirga,Adugna).

62

Current beneciaries:
We had a group before we came here but we were not strong. After our work with Adugna
our dancing is better and we are a stronger group. I have started teaching a group of younger
people with disabilities. People in Ethiopia think that people with disabilities cant do
anything so we are showing them that we can work too. They are very surprised to see us
dancing with and lifting able bodied dancers and they are changing the way they think about
disabilities (Tilahon,Adugna Potentials).
Before we started this training [with Adugna] it was mostly the girls that were trying to work
with the community about HIV/AIDS with maybe two of the boys coming along to help.
But now we are all working together, we all have the same amount of information, we are as
many boys as girls, we are a cohesive group now. The training has given us a lot more options
to use in the future with our community. We really like all the things we have learned, it has
given us more pride in ourselves and more condence to do our work in the community. At
rst the contemporary dance was hard for us [because it takes us out of our traditional
gender roles] but now we enjoy it very much, it lets us tell the community about [the issues
related to the behaviours that put young people at risk of] HIV and AIDS (Compilation of
comments from 4 male and 4 female members of a 21 strong member Kebele Anti AIDS club,
being trained by members of Adugna).
Individual impact:Terefwork Negussie
The researcher witnessed the impact of the Adugna programme on one individual and her
family. Terefwork Negussie is severely disabled with cerebral palsy. She was accepted into the
group, Adugna Potentials, consisting mostly of young people left with physical disabilities
following polio. Her father Ato Negussie explained that before joining Adugna Potentials Teref
had sat in her chair all day in the house, shut away, very depressed and angry with us, her
parents.Within three months of joining Adugna Potentials he reports that:Now Teref herself,
we her family and everyone are really excited and thrilled for her performances and the
improvements she is showing in her behavioural attitudes She has avoided all those unpleasant
behaviours like worry ness [sic], frustrations, sadness, nervousness and unnecessary bothering.
Instead she became calm, happy, sociable, morally she built condence, peaceful and loving. Due
to the dancing exercise and activities she gained active movements in her physical conditions.
This is really a wonderful achievement.Look at her, rolling herself along the oor, rolling over
other dancers, pushing others to roll them over and enjoying every minute it is wonderful to
see her now, she is doing so much with her body we never dreamed she could do.

Sources

Plastow, J. (2003). Dance and transformation:The Adugna Community Dance Theatre. Book
chapter, forthcoming.
Ethiopia Gemini Trust evaluations and annual reports to Comic Relief.
Interviews with members of Ethiopia Gemini Trust staff, members of Adugna,Adugna
Potentials and Anti AIDS club members.
Interview with and documentation provided by Ato Negussie, father of Terefwork.

63

2 Global Dialogues Scenarios videos (Comic Relief)

Country/region

Africa/Sahel region

Project focus

Scenarios From The Sahel/Scenarios From Africa is lm 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.

Background

Scenarios from the Sahel was originally designed as an HIV/AIDS prevention project carried
out with and for adolescents and young adults in West African countries, which aimed to
contribute to a sustainable reduction in risk behaviour for HIV/AIDS in Senegal, Mali and
Burkina Faso and throughout sub-Saharan Africa, particularly in the under-25 age group.
Scenarios from Africa is the demand-driven scaling-up of Scenarios from the Sahel.
The projects objectives were:

to improve young peoples access to appropriate information about sexual and
reproductive health;

to help develop an environment more open to discussion of these issues;

and to promote responsible sexual behaviour.

Level of cultural
intervention

Culture as method (lm) both tool and process-based

Activities

Contests in 1997, 2000 and 2002 invited young people up to age 25 to submit ideas for
short lms on subjects related to HIV/AIDS.The contests have attracted 42,252 participants.
The contests promoted dialogue, encouraged young people to seek out information about
HIV/AIDS, and promoted reection. Evaluations, both external and internal, suggested the
number of people inuenced by the contest and associated debate would be considerably
higher than the number of participants.
13 short ction lms, based on ideas in the rst two contests, were produced by African directors.
The lms are available in 19 languages have been widely distributed to broadcasters throughout
Africa and around the world. They have been broadcast on at least one state-run or private
television station in almost every country in sub-Saharan Africa, and on twenty stations in
Nigeria. Broadcasts on over 75 television stations in or serving Africa have been conrmed.
Over 12,000 copies of a compilation cassette (and a video CD) of the lms for use in schools and
communities across the continent have been distributed in a range of languages. A companion
Users Guide, is available in electronic format in English and French.

Filming with two young actors

for Scenorios from Africa in
Burkino Faso. Global Dialogues.

The 2002 edition of the Scenarios contest used as central partners HIV/AIDS organisations
and individuals most closely affected by the epididemic. In several countries, people living
with HIV/AIDS served as outreach workers and discussed the scenarios with participants.
7,249 scenarios were submitted to the contest.

64

Outcomes

12,000 copies of the compilation video are currently in circulation in Africa and the
audience so far is believed to run into hundreds of thousands.

Near-universal approval by respondents.

High levels of dialogue: 82-87% spoke with someone about the lms.

Mali/Senegal: 80%+ of those who spoke about it did so with a girlfriend, boyfriend
or sexual partner.

Made them reect on HIV/AIDS within their lives (93-100%); made them inclined to nd
out about HIV/AIDS (92-97%); buy/use condoms (78-96%).

Made them more inclined to support people living with AIDS.

Made them more inclined to wait until married/older before they had sex.

Contests have encouraged teachers, participants and parents to nd out and learn about
HIV/AIDS; have increased dialogue and reection on HIV/AIDS

Helped jurors identify areas within their country which needed greater awareness-raising
on HIV/AIDS, and compare the relative strengths and weaknesses of HIV-related efforts in
various countries.

Beneciary feedback
(reported)

No feedback directly from beneciaries is available.

External evaluators, assessing the use and impact of the lms in Senegal, Burkina Faso and
Togo in Spring 2003, concluded:
Every partner met expressed tremendous appreciation of the lms. The Scenarios lms are
perceived as valuable tools in HIV/AIDS awareness raising campaigns and programmes
because they are high quality lms that reect everyday situations in West Africa in general
and Senegal in particular. The lms are also greatly valued for their humor and sensitivity,
which serve to attract viewers and hold their attention. In addition, the Scenarios lms stand
apart from other HIV/AIDS awareness raising lms because of their relatively short duration
of two to nine minutes.
The lms are widely distributed and their success is real, as they have become the primary
awareness-raising resource used by the actors in the eld of prevention and care whom I
met. Young people say they are moved by the stories recounted in the lms and many of
them say that their behaviour has changed or is going to change after seeing Scenarios from
the Sahel. They have contributed to raising the awareness of the general public and
particularly young people while entertaining them about the modes of prevention linked
to realistic and feasible behaviour change.

Sources

Global Dialogues annual reports to Comic Relief

65

3 Stepping Stones (Actionaid)

Country/region:

The 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 Gambia is a predominantly Muslim country with relatively low rates of HIV infection.
There was increased prevalence of HIV and syphilis in the project area. There was a lack of
detailed knowledge about HIV, scepticism about its existence, and ambivalence towards
family planning. Unwanted pregnancy and fertility were major social problems. The
programmes emphasis on HIV was adapted to infertility prevention/reproductive health to
suit local needs.

Action Aid/Reect.

Stepping Stones supplemented school-based sexual health promotion, radio-based promotion

and peer education. It was implemented in partnership with the Department of State for Health,
Gambia Family Planning Association, World Wide Evangelisation for Christ Mission and the
Medical Research Council. It is a UNAIDS-recommended resource for community mobilisation.

66

Level of cultural
intervention

Culture as context
Culture as method (drama) process-based

Activities

Drama was used to present ways in which relationship problems cause sexual and reproductive
health difculties. Common themes were: money love (transactional relationships), support
from husbands, poor parenting and teenage pregnancy.
The programme helps participants to increase control of their sexual and emotional relationships by working in single-sex peer-groups, usually 4 groups comprising older and younger
men and women. Workshops cover relationship skills, assertiveness, information on sexually
transmitted infections (STIs) and condom use. Peer-groups come together for joint meetings
and present dramas to the village to mobilise the whole community to support behaviour
change. Participants are also encouraged to involve themselves in peer education.

Outcomes

Increased risk awareness of HIV and sexually transmitted infections.

Value of condoms recognised before, within and outside marriage.

Women insisted on condom use in and outside marriage

Condom monitoring data suggested that condom uptake had increased.

Dialogue within marriage-fewer disagreements; less domestic violence.

Diffusion of messages took place with non-participants including children.

Beneciary feedback
(reported)

The techniques are good and some are very funny, such as the role-plays which we
really liked and found easier to understand.... for people like us who have never been
to school (female)

Some say it is transmitted through sex and some say it is transmitted by walking over dog
or horse or donkeys urine or some-one's urine who is infected, but nally (we) came to
know that it is through sex (male)

You should use (a) condom. If someone is infected with the disease he will not transmit
the disease to you because every thing will stop in the condom, but if you do not use the
condom he will transmit the disease to you (female)

We have learned the women have learned, the men have also learned. It has made us able
to get on with our husbands well in the matters of our marriage and with the people we live
with in the compound (female)

It only brought (good) things to us. Before we did not know how these diseases are acquired,
but now we know because of the lessons of the Stepping Stones programme. Before we were
sleeping but now we are awake. (female)
Stepping Stones consultant (interviewed in Rwanda):
It is a very powerful programme, very inclusive because people own the programme. It is both,
cultural and creative, cultural because it starts from where the people are and creative
through its use of drama, discussion following videos and other participatory methodology. It
gives people hope where they never had any Ive had feedback from previous participants
about how it has helped them solve some of their problems, improved their lives because
they have started small income generating activities which have given them better living
conditions, including nutritional status, increased their motivation and will to live, thus
extending the lives of people living with HIV/AIDS.

Sources

ActionAid evaluation report of Stepping Stones in The Gambia.

Stepping Stones consultant, Rwanda

67

4 Urunana (Health Unlimited)

Country/region:

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 conict-affected women in the
Kinyarwanda and Kirundi-speaking areas of the Great Lakes region of Africa.

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 Rwanda. The programmes deliver
health education messages as well as discussing social behaviour patterns that are linked to
specic health issues such as malaria, TB, STDs and HIV/AIDS. Programmes aim to present
information in order to promote discussion that will lead to behaviour change. Key target groups
are rurally based unmarried youth, single women and widows, adults of child bearing age (both
male and female), health clinic staff and users, community elders, soldiers and militia.
In a national survey conducted in 2000, women identied access to healthcare as a major
constraint on their well-being and development. Barriers were: distance from a health facility,
inability to meet costs, and obstacles to free and frank discussions with medical personnel.
Key priorities for the Ministry of Health are: high levels of maternal and infant mortality,
teenage pregnancy and STDs.

Level of cultural
intervention

Culture as context (local cultural issues taken into account in design)

Culture as content (local cultural issues feature in drama)
Culture as method (radio drama) tool-based

Activities

The programme format is a ten minute soap opera episode followed by a ve minute Agony
Aunt slot, which aims to address issues and questions arising from previous episodes.
Drama is popular in Rwanda and links to storytelling traditions.
Urunana is set in a village to reect the experiences of rural life. Programme content is based
on health needs. Technical information is sought from stakeholder meetings and programme
feedback is obtained through monthly pre and post audience surveys, which do not provide
any depth of information regarding impact.
Audience groups have been run for two to three years.There are up to 40 people per group (20
youth, 20 women) and one group in each of the 11 provinces. Feedback from the audience
groups is used to inform script writing. Although the content of the soap is needs driven,
beneciary feedback is not related to project objectives, only the content of the soap. An
Audience Researcher gathers feedback from listeners letters and phone calls.

Community theatre activities

as part of the Urunana project
in Rwanda. Health Unlimited.

68

Outcomes

30% listenership was estimated during 2000, but current estimates are 80%

Urunana has a dedicated team that is willing to learn/improve their skills and listen
to suggestions from listeners e.g. live drama, printed comics/literature.

Questions about topics in Urunana appeared on National Curriculum exams.

Requests received from other groups to include other issues in Urunana stories
(eg. agriculture, environment, peace and reconciliation).

Beneciary feedback

Focus Group Discussions in Byumba Province during Routemapping research visit:

(observed)

Comments on programmes

These programmes reect true youth life style, encourages openness of sexual issues and
effects and preventive measures that could be taken.This programme gives useful message
to families and encourages tolerance and living a harmonious life.These programme touches
on all aspects of life we lead in relation with our community

Radio is the only medium because it is entertaining and listened to by many people literate
and illiterate. Other mediums like written materials (booklets, news letters) could get to us
through district coordinator for reference of only those that could be able to read

Radio carries a lot of information but other sources like live drama and news paper would
also be good
Learning outcomes

Avoiding HIV/AIDS by abstaining, faithfulness or use of condom; lessons were also
learnt on family planning

Lessons on how to prevent HIV/AID and on how children are sexually abused

Avoiding sex being unfaithful as it may lead to STDS and HIV/AIDS,Teenage pregnancy
effects of extra marital affairs.Taking care of HIV/AIDS patients (avoid stigmatizing them).

How to solve conicts in a family
Community-level change

Increased condom use; abstinence and ability to discuss issues on reproductive health

No stigmatizing of people living with HIV/AIDS, people have started practicing family
planning or its importance

People know how HIV is transmitted

Youth have started the use of condoms and others are abstaining, but others are still
fearing to carry condom

Your programme work my made me alert that AIDS kills and I made a turn from
my former behaviour

Attitude towards people living with HIV/AIDS is changing

People learn and talk about problems that will slowly facilitate the effect of
behavioural change
Personal attitude change

Knowledge on the working of my body was increased and I have controlled
my sexual behaviour

Little changes as people are still sexually promiscuous

[I] know the importance of using condoms and know now what true love is

Danger of HIV/AIDS spread and the importance of abstinence and using a condom
Behavioural change

No sexual promiscuity

Cant trust any body in matters related to HIV/AIDS

Live positively and support AIDS patient as Mariana does

Cautious as some men are not trustworthy; the example of Semana

It is good to be open

Sources

Health Unlimited documents.

Interviews with staff of Urunana, beneciary focus group discussion participants Byumba
Province, Rwanda
69

5 Eye to Eye project (Save the Children UK)

Country/region:

Lebanon/Occupied Palestinian Territories and UK

Project focus

Eye to Eye is a multi-media project which enabled fourth-generation Palestinian refugee

children living in refugee camps in Lebanon and Occupied Palestinian Territories to express
themselves through photography and the web.

Background

Palestinian children in refugee camps in both Lebanon and the West Bank and Gaza Strip are
growing up with injustice, physical and mental violence, deprivation and discrimination,
where their rights are being abused. The political history and failure to nd a solution has led
to increased anger, radicalisation and Islamisation. For some children joining radical groups is
the equivalent of supporting Manchester United. After more than 50 years in exile
expressions of anger, frustration, of wanting to ght back are commonplace and reected in
childrens behaviour.
This is why expressive methods such as photography play a useful role. Palestinian children
lack safe spaces in which they can talk about their experiences and express their ideas, hopes
and fears. SCUK helped provide a non-violent, rights-based framework for methods which
enable them to explore their lives and communicate their experiences to others. Eye to Eye
aimed to give Palestinian children a voice which can be heard both within their own societies
and more widely; with a view to creating a climate of awareness, positive change and action.
The two main aims of the project were to raise public awareness and increase understanding
among audiences in the UK of the needs and rights of Palestinian children and the negative
impact of the stalled peace process; and to increase awareness among Palestinian communities
of the value of childrens work in presenting their situation to the outside world.

Level of cultural
intervention

Culture as method (photography, multimedia activities) process-based with initial

participants, leading to either tool or process-based use of curriculum materials and web
based information

Activities

Six photography-based workshops were held in refugee camps in Lebanon, the West Bank
and Gaza Strip, including four seven-day workshops producing materials for local display (in
Arabic) and international exhibitions (in English) and for a website developed and managed
by the Education Unit in the UK. Two shorter emergency intifada workshops focused on
eliciting materials for the website.
The workshops used a powerful, highly participative, expressive methodology which enabled
the children to learn new skills and gain self-condence, think for themselves about their lives
and communities, and represent themselves to external audiences. Images, quotes and texts
by children were used in exhibitions and in education and advocacy work in the Middle East
and in the UK.
Photographic workshops were developed following a one-off workshop created and
facilitated by freelance photographer Pete Fryer with Palestinian children in a refugee camp
in Lebanon in 1997. Children used cameras to get to know and take photos of one another
and record life in the camp. They interviewed elders and/or produced written work for an
exhibition of up to 700 images. In some workshops books were produced by the children
with the purpose of providing a referenced resource from which website, exhibition and other
materials could be selected in London. Cameras were left with after-school clubs and partner
organisations in the camps to allow children to continue to take photographs.
The website provided information for Global Education in the UK and offered a controlled
message board system to facilitate interaction and exchange between Palestinian refugee
children and other individuals and groups around the world. The website also incorporated
curriculum materials linked to ICT, Citizenship and RE for use by teachers in the UK.

70

Outcomes

An estimated 100 children participated, including 10 who were involved in later workshops
as volunteer assistants or peer educators.

1,000 people are estimated to have seen the children's exhibitions in their refugee camps.

Created exciting methods for engaging with children, facilitating participation and
promoting their views within their own communities and to external audiences.

Anecdotal evidence shows the exhibitions are changing perceptions about children in their
communities.They appear to be increasing belief in childrens abilities and respect for
children among parents/other family members, community leaders and national leaders.

After seeing the childrens exhibition in one Gaza refugee camp the head of the local council
said he had not seen the children in such a positive light before and that he would involve
children from the camp in further activities.

The website incorporates online curriculum materials for UK teachers

Developed and brought together a range of new tools for Save the Children work with
children including photography, text, internet and video

A second Eye to Eye project is planned for India for which a pilot was run in 2003 using
digital technology within a similar framework to address child rights.

Beneciary feedback
(reported)

Summaries of participatory review workshops with 30 children in two different camps

in Lebanon reect strong, positive consensus:

we learnt new skills, especially how to take photos, do an interview, approach adults and
other children

we made new friends and met new people

we visited and learnt about different parts of the camp

we understood some of the problems in the camps

we developed our own ideas

we gained condence

we had fun and were happy
Children commented on the value of the project to them/their family:

I became free and from inside more self-condent

It makes me happy

My mother was very happy when she saw me using the camera

My father wants me to become a journalist now
According to one local social worker, an extremely shy girl who had barely spoken with her
peers in the two years since she arrived in the camp gradually began talking with the other
children through the workshop. She later brought family members to see her work in the
exhibition and to meet other children.
In Lebanon one Palestinian child with Downs Syndrome volunteered:During the rst intifada
we saw on TV that the Israelis were pushing journalists to take pictures we can do this
instead of journalists and show people what our lives are like.
In Balata Refugee Camp one teacher commented: This is the rst time we have seen the
childrens ideas.There are no adults translating this work it shows the childrens perspective.
In Lebanon the local exhibitions have also had some impact outside the Palestinian
community. For example, one Lebanese national commented: I didnt know conditions in
the camps were so bad.

Sources

SCUK internal documents

71

6 Buddhist monks in the ght against AIDS (Save the Children UK)
Country/region

Cambodia

Project focus

During 2002 SCUK started working with Buddhist monks on an advocacy programme to
mobilise faith-based communities in the ght 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 monks bag for monks to use in their communities.

Background

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
inuential 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.
One of the major tenets of Buddhism is compassion, it is fundamental to the practice of the
religion and the philosophy. Monks can be powerful advocates for compassion towards those
with HIV and the children of families with HIV and orphans of AIDS; monks can advocate for
community support for these people. Monks through their teaching can discuss the threats
that HIV creates to individuals and communities. As monks come to understand HIV/AIDS
and the transmission of HIV they can advocate for an end to stigma and discrimination which
in part stems from fear and poor understanding of HIV and the social causes of transmission.
Through counselling and support of HIV positive people, monks can be an example of nondiscrimination and assist in the prevention of stigma. Monks can assist those with HIV
through the teaching of meditation practice. Many young men do not enter the Monkhood
for life so understanding sexually responsible behaviour is something they can take with
them when they return to the lay community.

Level of cultural
intervention

Culture as context
Culture as content (drawing on Buddhist tradition and cultural items)
Culture as method (IEC materials) tool-based

Activities

The project is embedded in culture, it is a cultural approach in itself as Buddhism and monks
are such a large part of the majority culture, although it cannot incorporate those members of
Cambodian society who are of different religious or ethnic backgrounds. Training workshops
for monks were participatory or through small group work but monks cannot act or be
portrayed by others in drama or theatre so that one method was not available in the
participatory workshop approach. The main creative component was the IEC materials
produced a cloth poster showing the place of monks in the ght against AIDS and the use of
the traditional monks bag (with the slogan that Monks also have a place/role in the ght
against AIDS) as the carrying case for the IEC materials.

Outcomes

In a 2003 evaluation Monks participating in the workshops reported:

clear knowledge of the facts about HIV/AIDS;

increased condence to undertake advocacy activities and to speak about HIV/AIDS in
general;

increased effectiveness in their use of the principle of compassion in their work, both when
supporting people with HIV/AIDS and when discussing stigma and discrimination in their
communities.

using their training in a wide variety of formal and informal situations, including peer
education sessions, preaching, Buddhist ceremonies, group discussions and national events
such as World AIDS Day.

Beneciary feedback
(reported)

A community member reported how one mobile funeral service operating in his district was
refusing to cremate people who had died of AIDS. This was because of the widespread belief
that HIV/AIDS could be passed on by touching the clothes of the dead person and through
contact with their ashes at the cremation site. He spent some time with one of the monks
who had attended the training in Phnom Penh and began to understand how these concerns
72

were unfounded. Through support from the pagoda he was able to meet with the mobile
funeral service and explain the facts about HIV transmission. As a result he managed to
persuade them to start cremating people who had died of AIDS. Monks have subsequently
attended such ceremonies and helped reduce the stigma attached to this function.As they are
such public events he felt it likely that people were beginning to change their attitudes in
response to seeing monks and the funeral service operators actions.
One monk master related how before the training he felt a certain amount of reluctance to
support people with HIV/AIDS and believed that people had brought it on themselves by
playing around. In addition one of his relatives, who was HIV positive, had been shunned by
the community and forced to move away and live in isolation with his family. Until the
workshop the monk had thought a great deal about this personal situation but could see no
way to deal with it. Some time after the workshop he went to visit his relative with some of the
handouts. He used these to explain the training he had been given and how he felt he had a role
to support his relative and their family. He then went on to discuss these issues with the village
leaders and community members and urged them to be more compassionate and support the
family rather than cast them out and be afraid of them. Since his intervention the family have
moved back into the community and as a result of the support they have received, their overall
health has improved, as have their relations with the community at large.

Sources

SCUK evaluation report

Interview with SCUK staff in Cambodia

73

7 PILLARS (Tearfund)
Country/region:

Project focus

Worldwide including Myanmar, Ethiopia, Brazil, India, Nigeria,

Burkina Faso and Sudan

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.
The information materials are also designed to be very easy to translate into mother tongue
languages among minority language groups. PILLARS focuses heavily on the importance of a
local cultural dimension in information, education and communications, which includes
discussing the cultural context of development issues and translating existing guides, and
producing new guides in local languages. Translations have been made into over 30
languages, many of them minority languages. In Myammar and Brazil, those involved in the
translation process have replicated the training with other local language groups.

Background

PILLARS builds on development research that indicated that there was a paucity of printed
materials which were relevant to poor people. Coupled with this was the need for development
processes to recognise the cultural and linguistic rights of individuals, to enable them to learn
and communicate in their own mother tongue and practice their own culture and traditions.
In many of the contexts in which PILLARS has been
implemented, the language and culture of groups have been
marginalised by a more dominant group. By giving value
to minority languages and cultures, the PILLARS process
reinforces a positive sense of cultural identity and selfesteem, and is a powerful unifying force. It also raises the
prole of that language group and improves their access to
relevant and practical printed information. The PILLARS
process not only focuses on groups which are marginalised
on the basis of culture or ethnicity, but also excluded on the
basis of education, age and gender.
Guides have been produced on a number of community
development issues, such as food security, agroforestry,
micro-credit and HIV/AIDS. Tearfund has supported the
PILLARS translation process in a number of countries
including Uganda, Southern Sudan, Nigeria and Burkina
Faso. A formal two-year pilot has just been conducted in
Myanmar, Ethiopia and Brazil.

Level of cultural
intervention

Cultural content

Activities

In Myanmar, church workers, community workers, teachers and health workers produced
PILLARS Guides in Burmese, and replicated the training with a further 13 language groups.
This has proved to be particularly empowering in a context where there is effectively no
freedom of speech or expression and no recourse to democratic systems and processes, and
where the Burmese language and culture is promoted over and above minority languages
and cultures. The Guides encourage people to value their knowledge, language and culture,
whilst going some way to meeting the need for information on community development
issues, and provide a space for people to voice their concerns and to suggest practical
solutions to address these.

ABOVE A role play in Nigeria with

participants working on a
PILLARS guide in Yoruba.
Isobel Carter/Tearfund.

In Brazil, indigenous people are traditionally marginalized and oppressed, and are among the
poorest, most vulnerable and under-represented groups of society. Although government
and non-governmental organisations are engaged in advocacy on indigenous issues, they
generally speak on their behalf rather than empowering them to tell their own stories. Many
of the indigenous languages and cultures are themselves endangered. The PILLARS process
has brought together both the Portuguese speaking and the indigenous community, and this
has proved to be an effective way of building understanding and respect.

74

In Ethiopia, training has been conducted in a refugee camp, with the Mabban language group
from Southern Sudan. The implementing organisation, ZOA Refugee Care, considers the
Guides as a tool to facilitate community planning as they prepare for repatriation. One
participant said it was a landmark in the history of the Mabban people, since the only
literature currently available in their language are the Bible and some basic literacy primers.

Outcomes

Guides produced in several local languages during pilot study

(eg Burmese, Portuguese, Mabban)

Guides produced in over 30 local languages

Training extended to 13 language groups in Myanmar, in addition to Burmese,
and 6 language groups in Brazil.

Training in translation and facilitation helps equip local leaders to adapt ideas from
outside the community and share ideas in oral/written form.

Participatory process enables groups to develop a democratic process of information
sharing, which can enable them to bring their own issues and priorities to the fore.

New guides were produced in Myanmar on rural education and drugs trafcking;

In Ethiopia the Wolaitta group wrote a guide on Harmful Traditional Practices, including
topics on gender equity and cultural practices which are harmful to health and well-being
of women and children.The local government ofce has requested copies of this literature
as none is available in the Wolaitta language.
The process of meeting regularly to discuss development topics helps a community group to
grow.The PILLARS topics encourage people to plan and work together, strengthening the group.

Feedback

Facilitator (Myanmar): We have so many languages in our country. Through this programme
people can not only maintain and value their culture and literature but can also provide
knowledge and useful information about development to the community.
Facilitator (Ethiopia): Practical advocacy work for a community forgotten by the rest of the
world and people displaced from their original domicile, deprived of their natural rights to
peace and undisturbed community life. The Mabbans were facing the risk of loosing their
identity and their rights to acquire knowledge. PILLARS has gone some way to restoring the
rights of these people to receive information and participate in the development of their
communities so that the present and future Mabban could have a better future.

Benciaries

The development of a community depends largely on the fabric of its own knowledge
and language. Cultural diversity increases our vision, Portuguese mother tongue
participants, Brazil.
I want to live out what I have learned and reect the value of being an Indians.We need to nd
a way to be proud to be Indian to work to help each other to develop our own identity. Caiua
language group, Brazil

Sources

Summary report, PILLARS coordinator

Report of the second PILLARS workshop, Brazil
Report of the third PILLARS workshop, Ethiopia

75

Artwork from child rights art

competition. Asian Regional
Rights Resources Centre.

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About Routemapping,
Culture and Development
Routemapping Culture and Development grew from informal research in 1993 by members
of the Creative Exchange team. A policy advisor in one major UK development agency was
curious about the cultural dimension of development, but thought that arts and culture had
a minimal role in the agencys programme. He offered to check their database and to his
surprise came across 74 projects over the previous three years with a cost base of 600,000.
There are plenty of anecdotal reports of the role of culture in development. But very little
empirical research has been attempted to investigate how these issues connect in the
practical, demanding and frequently acute business of live development programmes.
Routemapping was a 12-month pilot research project carried out in 2002-2003 with ve UK
development agencies, who are partners of Creative Exchange, and therefore already
engaged in dialogue about the cultural dimension of development. They were ActionAid,
Comic Relief, Health Unlimited, Save the Children UK and Tearfund.
The research aimed to increase our collective understanding of how cultural issues and activities are being incorporated into the development agenda, what the impact and value of that
work has been, and how it contributes to social and economic development. See Appendix A
for further detail about the research hypotheses.
A formal research report, written and assessed by DFID in November 2003 is available on the
Creative Exchange website: www.creativexchange.org/publications.html

What did the

Routemapping
project do?

Project partners sourced information about Culture and Development projects within their
own organisations. The research process included literature reviews, interviews and informal
discussions with agency and project staff in the UK and in eld ofces in Nepal, Cambodia,
Thailand, Ethiopia and Rwanda. A researcher attended training sessions, performances and
discussion groups with performers and beneciaries.
The project encountered a major challenge in the absence of any keywords covering culture
or creative forms of activities in any of the ve agencies information systems. Researchers
had to seek out institutional knowledge and track it out to the eld and back again, a process
called snowball sampling. As a result, the data returned was patchy, not comparable or
denitive it represents the tip of an iceberg of unknown proportions in terms of culture and
development projects within these agencies.

What did the

Routemapping
project nd?

Summary results on use of culture and development projects

projects with cultural/creative components in over 40 countries. The majority were overtly
cultural (using a creative approach) because these were easier to nd and track than projects
which were working with socio-cultural issues more generally.
Very few of these 350 projects were independent cultural or creative projects (i.e. funded in
their own right as freestanding projects).The majority were integral to larger projects.
The overwhelming majority of projects were targeted at social outcomes. Only two projects
were identied which addressed economic development (only one of which was a funded
project).
The majority of activities documented in the Routemapping project were identied by
agency staff working at country level as being used as part of a participatory process. This is
described by some as using visualisation techniques such as mapping, diagrams, timelines
and graphic representation to help people systematise experience/knowledge; and by others
as using music, art, crafts, dance, songs, skits, theatre and IEC materials. Some agency staff
interviewed saw culture as part of an integrated approach to participation; others mentioned,
or demonstrated using, cultural activities as part of a message-driven approach.

78

The main forms of cultural/creative activities identied by agency, project or partner staff fell
into the following categories:
Table 1a
Cultural activities identied
Participatory Processes
Drama
Music, dance & word
Radio
Photography, lm & video
Art
IEC/posters

Table 1b
Development topics use of creative methods
30%
27%
13%
12%
8%
6%
4%

The main development topics which are

using cultural/creative methods include:
Gender (including trafcking)
Education
Health
HIV/AIDS
Child development/welfare
Peace/conict/reconciliation
Youth issues

24%
23%
12%
12%
12%
9%
8%

The research found that HIV/AIDS is addressed most often by participatory processes and drama.
Given that participatory processes usually involve the use of more than one type of activity,
drama is the single most used cultural/creative form.
Music, dance and word, and radio are the next most used cultural forms.

Summary results
on cost

A conservative cost for the 350 projects is in excess of 30 million.This cost base was assessed
by the partner agencies themselves.
Table 2
Number of projects and cost by agency Number of projects
Action Aid
Comic Relief
Health Unlimited
Save the Children UK
Tearfund

Summary results
on impact

Cost ( million)

Number of projects
228
31
12
45
34

Cost ( million)
13.0
6.3
7.5
3.4
0.42

Culture is embedded in thinking and practice

The level of nancial resourcing and scale of activity proved to be important evidence that
cultural issues are embedded in implicit thinking and eld practice within the partner
agencies. Their willingness to participate and commit ofcer time was an indication of their
strong commitment to culture and development. Senior managers participated in most
meetings, which was signicant given that the subject matter is still marginal.
There is limited explicit policy/guidance
However, the research found limited explicit policy on culture and development. One agency
had explicit reference to cultural sensitivity and cultural transformation within main project
guidelines. One agency indicated that guidance was available at department level on the use
of cultural activities. Another agency has a manual that alludes to cultural issues and use of
cultural forms in participation, but does not make explicit reference to culture.
There is little evidence of strategic thinking or impact analysis
There was very little evidence of a rationale or strategic objectives for cultural/creative
activities unless they were independent projects.Where these activities are integral to larger
projects they are generally not viewed as warranting reporting or evaluation in their own
right. Since the majority of activities are integral to other projects, data on their impact is not
generally available.
Monitoring and evaluation is limited
Agency staff at country level were struggling to identify appropriate forms of evaluation or
impact assessment.They recognise there is a need to assess long-term attitude and behavioural
change. However, very few cultural/creative activities were adequately funded for impact
assessment or follow-up evaluation. External evaluation may be underestimating, or ignoring,
the cultural dimension of projects.
There were many examples of cultural/creative projects that are obviously addressing
beneciary needs or project objectives but little evidence of how and why these projects
contribute to addressing development agency targets or how beneciary feedback is being
used to improve organisational performance and learning.
79

Lack of evaluation could expose agencies to risks

There were concerns that the lack of evaluation of cultural/creative activities which are
integral to larger projects could be exposing agencies to risk. Agency staff at country level
expressed concerns about the quality of implementation. Without adequate understanding of
how cultural processes work or contribute to development there is a risk that projects may give
inaccurate or distorted information, cause confusion or deter communities from engagement
with the development process.

Implications for the

development sector

Development agencies need to acknowledge culture

The development sector is already engaged and investing in culture and development. It
needs to nd ways of acknowledging, on its own terms, that culture is a powerful aspect
of social transformation, which needs to be included in planning, management, reporting,
monitoring and evaluation.
Cultural issues need to be explicitly recognised in development policy
The current invisibility within policy creates a vicious circle:

development agencies are not required to demonstrate how they are considering cultural
impacts and therefore there is no system of ensuring their work is culturally sensitive and
respects cultural rights and diversity;

there is no impetus to evaluate the majority of cultural projects to establish how they affect
beneciaries, as such there is no system of quality control;

without policy recognition, there is no incentive to collect data so that the role of culture is
made visible.
We need an evidence base
Without better evidence it is difcult to make a case for better policy recognition. But the
evidence is not being collected because, often, cultural data does not t into current assessment
criteria. One starting point is to start including cultural key words in IT systems, or introducing
a system of electronically tagging data on cultural projects, so that ongoing projects can be
tracked and their benets mapped over time. But there is a danger of encountering a vicious
circle cultural key words will require a degree of policy recognition.
Links between culture, participation or behaviour need to be better understood
Cultural projects need to be adequately grounded in behaviour change, learning, and participation theory.Without this, there is the potential for these processes to be used manipulatively.
Strategy and planning processes should take culture into account
Development agencies should give greater consideration to the cultural dimensions of
projects and programmes at the outset. There is a need for clearer strategies of how and why
a cultural approach is being used. Universal one-size-ts-all approaches fail to address
complex local cultural specics.
Cultural needs assessment and other tools are required
Cultural needs/impact assessment should be built into country assessment or project planning
(UNESCO, 1997).This may include the input of cultural specialists on planning teams (Box et al
1993, p14), participatory processes to identify local cultural resources (WFFD 2001 p19) and
the use of appropriate analysis frameworks as a starting point (Verhelst, 1997).
Expectations of cultural projects must be tempered with realism
Objective decisions need to be made about whether a cultural approach is appropriate, what
it can deliver, over what timeframe and whether supplementary activities are needed. A
drama about HIV/AIDS prevention cannot, in isolation, be expected to guarantee increased
condom use in a community, but it might inform donors of attitudes to condom use, which
can inuence donor strategy.
Evaluation methods need revision
Scientic and economic impact models fail to capture important qualitative aspects of
development, which are specic to cultural processes and activities.
New models need to capture personal and social impacts at individual, family/group,
organisation and community level.

80

Culture: Hidden Development

Helen G. Gould, Mary Marsh
2004

ISBN 0954884108
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