Development: quality education, ICT skills and human capacity
I spent my night in a very remote community and I’m still close to shocked.
Some children spend the first eighteen years of their lives in a village or let me say in very remote communities. No light, no network, no healthcare, no access to the internet and social media, little information about the happenings in the world; and they are growing in their own ways. They attend very local schools with teachers who are not far from being qualified in English, arithmetics and quantitative aptitude. They do not have access to books, quality books that can aid their comprehension, reading or listening skills. Most of them manage to find their ways through school and find a center in a town to write their SSCE/WASCCE where examination malpractices abound. However, these children acquire skills in at least farming, sewing and swimming, build reasonable proficiency in their local languages and are versed in the cultures of their people.
Some spend their entire lives there, others grew up, married, got children and died there. Buried there. And the world never knew them. And they impacted their communities in the little way they could, or never had any impact other than the number of children they brought to this world. It’s scary. Really.
If we are talking about empowerment or development, it must be about these peoples, connecting this development with their larger hopes, needs and aspirations. At the heart of this development should lie building their language skills, especially English, and facilitating trainings in ICT skills. These two should be pivotal; and they are what they need to find perhaps more meanings out of their lives and to make sense of the bigger world they know little of. Through these, they will build their communication skills and leverage technology, say social media, to articulate their pressing needs and contribute to national discourses. Their access to relevant information will enable them to make more informed decisions about people to vote for, around their health, and discarding some superstitious beliefs that are inimical to their growth and personal development as a people.
In my final year, before the strike, I was going to take a course in Development Communication in first semester, and for the very first time in my life, I’m able to connect with what the course is all about, I mean on a much deeper level. And that is improving the standards of living of people who have long been displaced and finding ways to empower them by building their capacities for self-development, self-sustenance, and self-actualisation, regardless of where they might be. Prior, I had almost finished the entire contents of the course and looking forward to building capacities along that area.
It then just occurred to me that development communication can also be done in a way. There are a very few of these children who have got access to the internet after traveling out of the community to read a course in universities or colleges of education. These students must’ve built some skills and competences while in a tertiary institution of learning. Upon returning home for a break, however short, they should organize workshops and trainings to teach the children some useful skills and show or give them what they’ve brought from ‘abroad’. The training might last for a day or two, it doesn’t matter. What matters is that the little children have been exposed to another way of seeing the world. They are now curious to know how the world is connected and that it is bigger than what they originally believed; and that the world doesn’t begin and end right there in their villages. If the older folks who have got access to technology could instill such curiosity in them, the little children would be eager and motivated to discover more things by themselves.
This is development communication that sees a privileged man focusing on his immediate family’s needs and those very much around him, and other men following suit. By this, there will be a collective development.
