Making Waves

Stories of Participatory Communication

for Social Change

CESPAC



1975 Peru

BASIC FACTS

TITLE: Centro de Servicios de Pedagogía Audiovisual para la Capacitación (CESPAC)

COUNTRY: Peru

MAIN FOCUS: Rural development

PLACE: Several rural areas in Peru

BENEFICIARIES: About 550,000 peasants

PARTNERS: Ministry of Agriculture, Centro Nacional de Capacitación e Investigación de la Reforma Agraria, Peru (CENCIRA)

FUNDING: FAO/UNDP, Friedrich Ebert Stiftung (FES)

MEDIA: Video

SNAPSHOT

It seems there are more than 300 communication schools in Latin America, training over 120,000 students. Most of these training centres aim to prepare communication professionals for the mass media, the advertising industry, the so-called business communication and public relations. There is not one single school of communication really training communicators for development, scientific communicators or pedagogic communicators. In part, that is the very reason why we find such a distressing situation in the field of communication for development.

How can an education process ever be efficient, in human and financial terms, where the teacher is only sending one-way unintelligible messages to a passive receiver, and where the whole process of learning is ignored?

How can the messages devised for development projects be adequate to a particular context if they are usually designed by people specialised in manipulating through commercial advertising?

How can messages that carry scientific information be socially appropriate if people that prepare them ignore the specificity of scientific language and only value as news those that are spectacular and unusual?

How can the population be informed if the informers are not informed and yet they produce messages that nobody understands, out-of-context, inappropriate, biased, and with no utility for the people?

It is very difficult to understand the reason why that type of communication school and university faculties continue to proliferate while there are not enough jobs for the newly graduated.

Our society needs schools that form another kind of communicator, those that do not exist right now, at least not in the quantities that are needed.

Excerpts from La Formación de los Comunicadores para el Desarrollo (The Training of Communicators for Development) by Manuel Calvelo, the founder of CESPAC.

DESCRIPTION

CESPAC was created in the early 1970s with support from FAO. This is one of those projects that was successful partly because of the motivation, dedication, deep involvement, clear objectives and stubbornness of one person. The person is Manuel Calvelo, a Spaniard that has been working in Latin America for decades, and has positively influenced many of the most innovative communication processes for rural development.

By 1975, the first group (27 staff members) was trained in seven months. It was decided from the beginning that everyone should be acquainted with all stages and skills of video production: research, scriptwriting, camera operation, sound, editing, production and dissemination. This was the first activity as well as the first mistake of the project: the training was too heavy on theory and too weak on direct experience in rural areas.

The process of recording, interacting with peasants, and conducting training sessions at the community level had to take into account the agricultural cycles and the availability of peasants during the day. For this reason the duration of videotapes was kept down to an average of 15 minutes.

A team of two people would normally stay in the community during the process of recording the video lessons that would be used or training. The same team had previously developed a script, which was reviewed by technical staff. Once the recording was completed, the team returned to CESPAC headquarters in Lima (the capital city of Peru), and produced a draft editing, which was again submitted to specialists on the subject matter, before returning to the field level for testing with peasants. Their comments and criticism would be the basis for a final editing.

The themes covered by the video lessons are as varied as the range of topics associated with rural development. For practical purposes CESPAC divided them into fewer categories: farming, livestock, natural resources, health and habitat, forestry and fish farming, and mechanisation.

CESPAC started operation with black and white video cameras nd open-reel recorders until 1978, when U-Matic (3/4-inch video) became available and facilitated recording and editing in colour. A few years later, when Betamax (Sony) and VHS (JVC) formats invaded the consumer markets, CESPAC acquired the technology and used it mainly for reproducing and distributing. In order to transport and protect the near 120 units used for showing videos at the village level, CESPAC built wooden cases to hold monitors and VCRs. Even with the lightest technologies of the early 1980s, the load was still 63 kilograms. Video projector technology had not yet improved as it has in the 1990s.

The project produced a series of manuals for trainers and for trainees, to orient the process of capacitación (training) by providing sets of questions and answers, and practical activities. The guides were fully illustrated to facilitate comprehension, and copies remained with participants for future reference.

CESPACs principle of gathering, preserving and reproducing indigenous knowledge, and adding to it modern scientific knowledge, facilitated the emergence of open flows of communication in many directions, linking communities with rural development technicians, or communities with other communities. Communication tools became familiar in rural areas largely deprived of electricity and telephone lines.

BACKGROUND & CONTEXT

Peru has gone under important changes in the last few decades. In the 1950s the majority of the population were native Indian mainly Quechua and Aymara, who lived in rural areas. The process of migration towards the cities in search of jobs altered the correlation in the following years: 6 percent of the population is currently living in urban areas, mostly incorporated in the slums around Lima. The capital city alone has six million of the twenty million people in the whole country.

Rural areas in the highlands, the coast or the Amazonian forest are deprived from basic services and investment. Agriculture has gradually diminished its importance; only 3 percent of the land is productive. Poverty in rural areas is pushing people into the cities while deeply affecting the social and economic structures of those rural communities.

The populist military government of General Velasco Alvarado launched an ambitious agrarian reform in 1969, aiming to eliminate large and unproductive properties and redistribute land to small peasants with the objective of encouraging the establishment of rural cooperatives in view of increasing agricultural production to meet the national needs.

In those years, FAO and UNDP backed the creation of CENCIRA, a centre of training and research for the Agrarian Reform. The design of CENCIRA included a component of communication for development aiming to train and orient the beneficiaries through the process. Peasants with very low levels of formal education were now in charge of running the cooperatives; it was imperative to mobilise and train them.

About 42 percent of the men and 67 percent of the women in rural Peru were illiterate in the early 1970s, so a very innovative approach was needed to face the challenge of improving the educational level and sharing the knowledge about agricultural modernisation. Based on the experience that FAO specialists had developed in Chile during the government of Salvador Allende, the choice of video was almost immediate. By 1975 the project started its activity under the name of CESPAC

ASPECTS OF SOCIAL CHANGE

The success of CESPAC has had enormous influence in planning and developing rural development programmes. The use of video tools for training is now widely accepted by governments and international cooperation agencies in Latin America. The rich experience of CESPAC was the main reference for the creation of PRODERITH (Mexico) and CESPAC (Mali). In both projects the leading staff had worked before with Manuel Calvelo in CESPAC

The programme outputs are impressive and show the extent ofthe achievements: 150 Peruvians were trained as video producers, 20 more learned how to use video programmes for rural development activities. More than one thousand video programmes were produced. By the end of the project in 1986, approximately 550,000 peasants had benefited from the video training sessions. Each training period lasted an average of six days, with peasants attending three hours every day. By 1980, 48 percent of the trainers were women.

According to Manuel Calvelo, CESPAC activities should not be evaluated in terms of cost/benefit, but rather of investment/results. The final cost of the training per person was only of US$24. We put together a highly efficient system, not only from the financial point of view, but in terms of the pedagogical achievements.

MEDIA & METHODS

Training is an essential condition for rural development. Many studies have given proof that rural productivity is directly related to knowledge about agricultural techniques. Lack of information often leads to lower performance of cultivated land. A programme that contributes to inform, organise and empower rural communities, as CESPAC did, can obviously make a difference, especially if the effort has been sustained over the years.

CESPAC is about capacitación a Spanish word already incorporated in the development jargon; it refers to training but goes far beyond. No single English word can synthesise or translate the meanings of capacitación The concept is not limited to acquiring technical skills or improving knowledge through information dissemination. It also relates to inducing individuals and communities to organise to transform their reality, to empower themselves through a process of appropriation of the tools and concepts that they can apply to development.

One of the methodological breakthroughs of CESPAC was to incorporate the original knowledge and practices of peasants, instead of bluntly discarding their culture and treating them as "ignorant". Thus Calvelo prevented the project from falling into practices of what he calls "academic terrorism".

Training was done in Quechua or Aymara, the peasants' mother tongue, and did take advantage of all kinds of cultural codes and customs that are an indissoluble part of their daily lives. The contents were heavily oriented towards having a practical value that peasants could use. The "visual pedagogy" devised by Manuel Calvelo and his team was encapsulated in "What I hear I may forget; if I see it, I can remember; if I do it, I learn".

CONSTRAINTS

By the time CESPAC started using video in rural Peru, technology was far behind what it is today, which makes this venture even more, revolutionary for its time. In the early 1970s only black and white video was widely available, with open reel recorders detached from the tube-based cameras. Equipment was heavy, not easy to carry, and needed heavy batteries or electricity to operate.

The project never really developed a process for the selection of staff consistent with the needs of the rural population. In many cases government imposed its choice of personnel who were not up to the tasks, not sufficiently motivated and committed, and oblivious of local language and customs. The initial training in 1975 was too long and heavy on theory, which was corrected in the following years.

As for peasant involvement in video productions, Colin Fraser asserts: "An objective analysis would demonstrate that there hasn't been enough peasant participation; the project has developed under so much pressure to survive that it has been unable to provide suitable attention."

SOURCES & REFERENCES

"Un Nuevo enfoque para la comunicación rural: la experiencia peruana en video para la capacitación campesina", a case study. FAO 1987.

"Video y Desarrollo Rural", by Colin Fraser. Chasqui N º33,Quito 1990.E-mail exchanges with Manuel Calvelo provided additional information.

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