Publications and Resources

Communication for Social Change: The New Communicator

A gloom landscape grows in many Third World countries. The more we invest in development, more we contribute to the growing of the cemetery of development, the striking vision of dust over computers that only worked a few months, water pumps that lasted one or two years only, huge construction machines on the side of roads that were never completed...

I've seen in a small town of Burkina Faso a brand new construction for a hospital which never opened its doors because there were no nurses and doctors to run it. I've seen two thousand post office mail boxes rusting under the rain in a village of five hundred illiterate families who neither received or wrote letters. I've seen water being wasted during months (a path of mold went down on the street) from a tap at a very dry village in the south Saharan belt known as Sahel, because nobody would spend about 3 US$ dollars to buy a part to repair the faucet. I've seen expensive and sophisticated OB vans (mobile television studios) grounded for years because their tires were flat. In Nigeria, UNICEF donated to the government more than one thousand 4 x 4 jeeps and pick-ups during the immunisation campaigns of 1988-1990, few are still on the road. The backyard of the Ministry of Education in Haiti looks like a cemetery of automobiles; brand new jeeps donated by the international cooperation agencies are piled after being virtually destroyed by accidents or due to the absolute lack of maintenance.

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