‘Communication for development' on the radar

It's been a hectic few days, partly thanks to preparations for next week's World Congress on Communication for Development. According to the organisers, some 500 policymakers, practitioners and researchers will be descending on Rome to "to share experiences and best practices in this growing field".

Several of us from Panos London are attending. I'll be running a session on what it really means to implement 'communication for development' (C4D) projects in the South, looking in particular at the interplay between politics, profit and poverty.

In many ways the Congress is a positive step forward. After all it's the first time a meeting of this kind has been dedicated to the field.

And it will – I hope – make a case for the role of communication in development, at a time when international funding agencies are tending to equate ‘communication technologies’ with ‘communications’, and thereby neglecting the political dimensions of C4D.

I don’t believe that C4D can work in a political vacuum. Do you?