COMMUNICATION AND COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT

 Community development is the process of helping a community to strengthen itself and develop towards its full potential. Communication is a key component of sustainable development.  Mobilizing community members for community development purpose is important but members of communities can only be mobilized when communication is effective. Adequate community communication leads to effective collaborative efforts in issue of development. Communication will help engage citizens in development. To bring about social change among the marginalized and vulnerable population groups, participation must be fostered through communication; as such will lead to the transformation of the community. This is to say that communication is a central or the mediating factor facilitating and contributing to collective change process (Sarvaes and Liu 2007). Effective communication will help in the move of people from individual centered deficit model of learning, behavior development and change to a collective and community focused model of participation, appreciation and equity.

Community is precipitated on the fact that daily interaction of citizens is essential to collective action and that effective communication serves as to stimulate and direct such interactions (when mention is made of communication in relation to community (rural development, it means an interactive process in which information, knowledge and skills relevant for development are exchanged between community members and information providers  either personally or through media such as radio, print, telephones and cybernetics. The aim of rural communication is to put rural people in a position to have the necessary information for decision making and the relevant skills to improve their livelihood.

Communication in communities, rural people are at the center of any given development initiative and so communication is used in this sense for people’s participation and community mobilization, decision making and action, confidence building for raising awareness, sharing knowledge and changing attitudes, behavior and lifestyle (FAO 2006).

This write up intends to look at the concept of communication in community development, trends and strategies in community development. to get the complete work please click here