Communication Between CIC and Public
Pro-Active Transparency
 by
Phil Bartle, PhD

Training Handout

Action must not be secretive;
the community members must know what is going on

 Just as in your own work of mobilizing you need to be
 transparent, facilitating, non dictatorial, and involving the
 community in decision making, so you should also encourage the
 executive to be the same towards its community. For maintaining good
 communications between the community and its executive, if carried
 out frequently, three useful methods are: meetings, reports, and
 inspections.

 Public community meetings are the most important means of
 ensuring a good flow of information between the executive and the
 community as a whole. (Elaborate meetings may include celebrations
 noted in the next section). At meetings you want to encourage and
 train the executive to take a "facilitating" role as you have been
 doing as a mobilizer. They need to develop good public speaking
 skills, avoiding speeches, lectures, sermons or pronouncements,
 learning to draw responses out of the participants. That two-way
 flow of information ("dialogue" means "two-way"), assists in
 increasing transparency and promotes good governance, participatory
 management and democracy.

 Reports are important, too. They should be well written in very
 simple language, and should be verbally announced at community
 meetings. Seek community responses. Inspections, where the
 community members walk around the project site with the executive,
 also encourage good communication and transparency.

 Posters and posted notices can assist in a good flow of
 communicating, but should not be used alone. They can complement
 public meetings but not substitute for them. They may be focussed on
 raising awareness, or on reporting the results of project
 activities. A statement of accounts, including income and
 expenditures, posted on the clinic or school while under
 construction, improves transparency.

 The important thing for you, as mobilizer, to emphasise is to
 encourage good governance, participatory management, integrity,
 transparency, by good communication between the executive and the
 community as a whole. The degree to which you have learned
 facilitation methods of leadership contributes to the degree to
 which you can encourage and train the executive and the community
 leaders to learn and use them too.

Updated: 2003 May 11
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