“In ten places in South Africa we could hear people talk, a group of women who told how they fought for sanitation here and groups that were starting to make money out of looking after sanitation. The local stories we produced were used by Mvula Trust to push for a greater focus on the message that the most important result from water and sanitation improvement is poverty reduction and economic development”. Dick de Jong looks back at the revolution in approaches and technologies in communication he has seen in his 30-year career with IRC in an interview with Peter McIntyre in The Hague on 13 October 2011.
Published on: 23/11/2011
“In ten places in South Africa we could hear people talk, a group of women who told how they fought for sanitation here and groups that were starting to make money out of looking after sanitation. The local stories we produced were used by Mvula Trust to push for a greater focus on the message that the most important result from water and sanitation improvement is poverty reduction and economic development”. Dick de Jong looks back at the revolution in approaches and technologies in communication he has seen in his 30-year career with IRC in an interview with Peter McIntyre in The Hague on 13 October 2011.
Dick in action, Photo IRC, 2011
Dick’s second lesson is: “We have to combine international newsletter stuff with making sure that voices from communities are heard at country level. In the past we had development demonstration programmes and we brought community voice from those programmes to the district level and to the national level. It has to be like that so that whatever we do on advocacy is evidence based.”
Read the full interview..
