OECD-DAC puts development communicators in prison

Communicators in development are having a hard time in the days of "Dead Aid" and the "White man's burden". This became obvious at the annual meeting of the OECD-DAC network of development communicators this week in Helsinki. Luckily, the prison in Katajanoka in Helsinki, where the participants were lodged, was just a former prison and had been turned into the nice hotel since. However, the hard work of communicators is very real. Communicators in development are those people, whose job it is to communicate to the public what the ministries and government agencies of OECD countries are doing in development cooperation. They seem to face three major challenges:

The first challenge is a negative perception of development cooperation in the general public. As Nick Perkins from IDS (UK) illustrated for the case of the UK, a majority of people in OECD countries are in favour of their governments to fight poverty in poor countries. At the same time, however, development cooperation is often perceived as being ineffective and marred by corruption.

This negative perception is often not based on sound knowledge about development cooperation and exacerbated by biased reporting, e.g. about Africa, in the main stream media. As one participant pointed out, if the media coverage in Europe about the USA in the last ten years had been similar to media coverage about Africa, we would have heard only three stories:a major terrorist attack in 2001, a president coming into office without the majority of the votes and a devastating hurricane. How can communicators address this biased and negative perception in the public?

Related to this is the conflict between visibility and transparency. Since the High Level Forum in Accra in 2008 donors have committed to more accountability and more transparency in their work. However, given the already negative image of development cooperation, there seems to be a strong resistance within aid agencies to fulfill this promise. Faced with a critical public, few donor agencies are willing to publish all their data, to be frank about corruption and mismanagement and to communicate both success and failure. There is a strong temptation to opt for public relations communication with a positive bias, for glossy brochures with smiling children and for edifying success stories of individual beneficiaries. Aid agencies are under pressure to justify their work by effective development. As Micheal Ward of the OECD pointed out, this trend is compounded by a finding of OECD peer reviews in recent years: donors turn more and more to flag waving in their project work - highlighting the contribution of their own agency as opposed to highlighting advances in development generally. Communicators cannot resolve the conflict between visibility and transparency, but they do have to manage it on a daily basis. Reaching the public with information about development cooperation and its impact is in itself a formidable challenge.

However, the real challenge, from my understanding is, that even among development experts there is no consensus as to what the impact of the work is. On a macroeconomic level evidence about the impact of aid is ambiguous. For over ten years evaluators have not been able to solve the problem of measuring impact at project level with certainty and without bias. Even if evaluations are able to answer questions about impact based on hard evidence, the questions may not be the questions of all stakeholders. In addition, positive impact at project level does not exclude negative impact at the macro level, for example on governance. Given all this ambiguity communicators may well feel emprisoned by contradictory challenges.

What then is the solution? Monitoring aid, not only individual projects, from a citizen perspective at a national level, may be one step in the right direction. The creation of NGOs in aid recipient countries, whose objective is just that, is encouraging in that sense. At the same time it is probably worthwhile to remember development cooperation is a very ambitious endeavour. Changing complex social, economic and political systems will never be easy. This may be an additional challenge of development communicators: explaining to citizens that development cooperation is indeed a bold undertaking.