The Communication Initiative
Development action with informed and engaged societies
The Communication Initiative
After nearly 28 years, The Communication Initiative (The CI) Global is entering a new chapter. Following a period of transition, the global website has been transferred to the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) in South Africa, where it will be administered by the Social and Behaviour Change Communication Division. Wits' commitment to social change and justice makes it a trusted steward for The CI's legacy and future.
 
Co-founder Victoria Martin is pleased to see this work continue under Wits' leadership. Victoria knows that co-founder Warren Feek (1953–2024) would have felt deep pride in The CI Global's Africa-led direction.
 
We honour the team and partners who sustained The CI for decades. Meanwhile, La Iniciativa de Comunicación (CILA) continues independently at cila.comminitcila.com and is linked with The CI Global site.
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Published 16 years ago
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Soul Beat Africa

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CONTACT PERSON: Anja Venth TELEPHONE: 083 433 2746 E-MAIL:aventh@comminit.comWEB-SITE:Soul Beat Africa websiteSoul Beat Africa focuses on the world of African communication for development, its practitioners, funders, policy makers and organisations. We provide a web based process that creates a space where these groups can quickly and easily identify, choose and engage with the information, knowledge, ideas and networks they decide they need to improve the impact and value of their work on major development needs in their communities, organizations and countries. The change principles this is based on are that people and organisations improve the relevance and effectiveness of their work through the following key factors:
  • Access to knowledge: Being able to quickly access useful information based on needs
  • Peer dialogue and review: Being exposed to, and engaged in, peer commentary and review of work, plans and ideas and in dialogue with others on effective development and communication strategies and investments.
  • Partnership building: Developing strong working partnerships as essential elements of action, strategy and thinking.
  • Strategic understanding: Expanding knowledge of strategic options and opportunities.
  • Horizontal linkages: Bringing to the forefront of policy dialogue, programme planning, evaluation and implementation the people most effected by development decisions.
  • Collective organisation: Coming together for action.
How does Soul Beat Africa seek to effects change? The web platform allows for horizontal linkages between people across organisations, geography and hierarchy. It allows a front line worker in Malawi to share information and/or interact with a senior policy maker in a bi-lateral. It helps build partnerships between people and organisations as they identify others working on similar issues and share experiences, solve problems, develop joint funding/programme proposals and collectively organise around issues of mutual importance. It allows for peer dialogue/review through a rating and comments system, discussion forums and other interactive features such as polls, blogs and groups. There is a significant focus on supporting strategic understanding through access to knowledge beyond descriptions of programmes (though these are important) to areas such as monitoring and evaluation, planning and strategic thinking. Finally the internet allows all this to be made available in real time so people can access the knowledge they need when they need it. Obviously not everyone has access to internet (though the numbers are growing fast) so email newsletters are also utilised to summarise new knowledge, promote discussion and review, and focus on specific issues.

Key features and capacities of The Soul Beat Africa process at present include:
  • Years of experience with the strategic use of new technologies in Africa coupled with a flexible and customised open source platform that integrates content management systems with interactive and expandable features such as content review and rating, discussion forums, groups, blogs and polls.
  • A growing network of 7000+ communicators with an interest in gender communication in Africa and more than 4200 working on gender rights communication in a range of settings from international organisations to CBOs.
  • A series of electronic magazines – e.g.: The Soul Beat Africa goes out every second week to a subscriber base of over 15,000.
  • Partnerships with significant regional NGOs – Soul City, SafAIDS, MISA.
  • A large body of existing knowledge on gender and links to gender based organisations.
  • A reputation for providing a neutral space to share knowledge and ideas – Soul Beat Africa does not editorialise by saying one programme is better than another or one piece of strategic thinking is better than another. This is left up to peer review processes and to individuals to determine the knowledge and links most useful to them and the issues they are addressing.
  • Strong links to two other related processes The Communication Initiative and La Iniciativa de Comunicación which together with Soul Beat Africa have a combined 2.3 million plus individual user sessions in the past 12 months and are supported by a partnership of 28 development organisations including several African and non-African ‘southern’ organisations. Click here to see the list of partners.
  • A self-subscribing network of communicators and other development actors - 70,000plus from 200 countries across the geographic and development spectrum – growing by 10 to 20 per day.
  • A series of theme sites that focus on the communication and media role on priority development issues as well as elements of the work of the communication and media development community.
  • A high profile and leading role in advocating for the communication and media for development field with policy makers and funders.
Soul Beat Africa is also developing other processes in support of communities of practise engaged in development areas such as HIV/AIDS that combine a number of interactive features supporting people’s ability to interact, advocate, share resources and plans, and build partnerships supporting action for change. These tools, networks and processes are relevant to strengthening communication for social change on issues of women’s rights, violence against women and on the gender behaviours, norms and practises that leave women vulnerable through inequality and injustice.