Strategically using ICTs to amplify voices of silenced groups

Tuesday, March 31, 2009

Creative Communication -


The Creative Centre for Communication and Development (CCCD) has embarked on a programme to advance the communication rights of orphans and vulnerable children through building their communication capacities and advocacy skills.
The creative communication programme developed by CCCD is aimed at systematically addressing the therapeutic and psychosocial needs of orphans and vulnerable children living in the suburbs of Queens Park East in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe.
The programme is aimed at providing information to parents, guardians, community leaders and other Non-governmental Organisations working with children about their psychosocial needs, fears, hopes and aspirations.
CCCD will use participatory learning action tools in a creative and fun away for children to write and preserve their life stories and those of their loved ones. The project will target 20 orphans and vulnerable children aged between five years and 10 years. Visual art, music, poetry and story telling will be used as tools for self expression and will be contained in individual Creative Memory Books.
This project is aimed at building children’s capacities and abilities in the strategic and creative use of communication to express their needs, to make their voices heard, to manage their own communication and to participate fully in their own development.
The targeted children will develop Creative Memory Books that also contain family trees, contact information of relatives, personal profiles and photographs of parents, relative and friends.
Children will also draw pictures about their fears, hopes, expectations, likes and dislikes. Separate pages of the creative Memory Books are to be filled out by either the children’s parents, or if they are absent, by relatives or the children themselves.
The project was developed to empower vulnerable and marginalised children with communication skills necessary to advance their communication rights in order to change their lives. Information from the books will be used to get identity documents for children. The books also contain summarised wills to information the child about critical issues that are contained in the actual will.
CCCD is a charitable non-governmental organisation advancing communication rights of marginalised and vulnerable people through building their communication capacities and advocacy skills in a creative way to systematically address human rights and all other fundamental freedoms.
CCCD was formed in 2008 by a team of qualified communication and media practitioners who have experience in working with marginalised and vulnerable groups.
The organisation operates at grassroots level and focuses on building local capacities and abilities of marginalised and vulnerable people in the strategic and creative use of communication to express their needs, to make their voices heard, to manage their own communication, and to participate fully in their own development through implementing participatory communication approaches to change public values and beliefs that are essential for long-term social change.
CCCD programmes are people-centred, premised on communication and meet the needs of the people at grassroots level.