Community Life Project

In this presentation for the UNAIDS Technical Consultation on Social Change Communication, June 2007, the author considers whether social change communication is something entirely new or a surfacing awareness and whether it always has a positive benefit. The author proposes building on heritage and existing traditions of social change communication, including the horizontal social frameworks, participatory planning through community dialogue, collective action, the sense of ownership, and positive impact on social conditions of projects that are initiated from within the community. This is followed by an analysis of whether this community self-help structure has been applied to the field of HIV/AIDS prevention and care. The author states that the programming in this area has been externally driven, lacking in local participation, inadequately attending to the community voices in decision-making, rejecting indigenous knowledge, working for the vested interests driving the programme, and addressing HIV/AIDS as a health-related epidemic among segmented populations, rather than as a socio-economic epidemic.

The
following lessons on changing structural conditions that are outlined in this presentation come from the Community Life Project (CLP), Lagos, Nigeria:

• Adopt the ‘Social Capital paradigm’ and work with people in their reference groups and social networks, in order to: 1) reinforce people's comfort level; 2) elicit positive peer influence through person-to-person communication; 3) activate psycho social support; 4) provide communication facilitation and deal with relationship dynamics; 5) work in the context of health and well-being; 6) reinforce aspirations of mutual fidelity; and 7) work with couples on gender issues.
• Address patriarchy and gender inequalities through the following: 1) integrate HIV prevention as part of a focus on maternal and child care; 2) address skills for an enabling environment, e.g., creating a fulfilling sex life, domestic valance prevention, family finance skills, conflict resolution, family planning, etc.; and 3) promote non-patriarchal values.
• Support local programme ownership and evaluate every 5 years to allow for a cycle of family change, including birth and shared domestic responsibilities, both within families and within communities, including allowing time for the effects of a critical mass of families with non-patriarchal values.
• Frame issues in the language of the people, represented by the formula: respect cultural ideology + communicate through local media using songs, dance, poetry, and drama.