NON-GOVERNMENT ORGANIZATIONS AND THEIR COMMUNICATION PRACTICES

Abstract

Communication and development have a symbiotic relationship. Development efforts have faltered and failed to yield the desired results in the absence of a proper development communication plan and policy. In this study, I have inquired into the broader aspects of the development communication practices taking place in three non-governmental organizations working in the sector of development in general and human rights in particular. I took the help of multiple holistic case study method to study the working of the NGOs in terms of their overall day to day works related to communication and development. My unit of analysis for the case study were the development communicators in the respective NGOs who helped me to understand about the overall communication processes in the NGOs and the subsequent social changes that they were able to bring about in their respective areas of intervention. I pretested the questions in two NGOs before applying them to the three NGOs under study. I also conducted key informant interviews of development communicators who have spent long years in the field and had the expertise to share with them the existing scenario of development communication in Nepal. Although the development ii communicators have the right perceptions about development communication, which is a contributor to ensure sustainability of development operations, they shared that they were not using an annual development communication plan to carry out their communication with their target audiences. One pertinent observation that I made was that the messages, which are prepared to be disseminated among the target audiences are not pre-tested and accordingly trimmed to fit the level of understanding of the audiences, which has given way to some sort of confusion. The NGOs have not been making the desired efforts to do a follow up on how the messages that they have been disseminating have brought about changes in their respective domain of work. It was clearly revealed that development communication is being treated as a perfunctory work and treated as a subject of routine dissemination of information to the targeted audiences. The need to have a national policy on development communication cannot be overlooked if development communication is to be exercised in the right way for the desired development results.