The RCPLA experience of the past years has demonstrated the crucial importance of communication in the field of development. Knowledge and information sharing among people is needed to achieve sustainable development. Communication for development is an approach that focuses on the capacity of local community members to manage the communication process and to plan and implement communication activities that suites their needs to realize the targeted change. Within this perspective, RCPLA has developed the Communication for Change (C4C) initiative that concentrates on the participatory approach and promotes the community media role in development.

C4C initiative is exploring the use of community based form of communication as a vehicle to transmit information, transfer knowledge, educate, persuade, entertain, and influence values to enable decision-making processes that change attitude and behavior. It is an attempt to understand the context in which community media exists and the system in which it operates. Local medium of communication stimulate the potential for change within a community by promoting the importance of grassroots participation and identifying their impact on the development process.

RCPLA experience shows that the point of departure for C4C is not the dissemination of a new idea; this initiative is building communities’ capabilities to emphasis their needs and viewpoints through a range of tradition and non-tradition forms of media, including community radio, forum-theater, participatory video/television, the world-wide-web. These activities can be equipped with a range of new tools to affect change, while also capitalizing upon the intrinsic expertise of communities.

Through the C4C initiative, RCPLA has produced “Our World Our Voice Our Media” as an attempt to capture the experiences and efforts of new community based initiatives using community media as a tool to make a critical difference to peoples’ lives.

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