Akuaba from Accra, Ghana

By Adesuwa Ero, 2nd year MDP student

For the last three months, I worked as an intern for Peoples Dialogue on Human Settlements popularly referred to as PD in Accra, Ghana. It is a community-based Non-Governmental Organization working in alliance with Cities Alliance and the Ghana Federation of the Urban Poor (GHAFUP) in providing and supporting improved livelihood initiatives for the urban slum dwellers. Through this internship, my goal was to synthesize urban development and communications. The opportunity to demonstrate through writing and visuals, the development efforts being achieved here, not just through the lens of development practitioners but also through the eyes of the beneficiaries and how these projects influence policy decisions. 

Although I am originally from West Africa, this was my first time visiting Ghana. Accra, the country’s capital and also where PD’s office is situated is a vibrant metropolitan city known as a commercial, manufacturing, and communications hub. 

 

My role as an intern at PD was to assist the programs’ officers with ongoing projects implementation and assist in coordinating community engagements. But, more importantly, to translate a lot of the office documentation ranging from community mapping and profiling, field visit reports, status reports into stories for the website, blogs, newsletters, project catalogs, press releases, validation reports, and other publications. 

Adesuwa at Kokrobite Beach

Through my time here, I have gained a deeper understanding of the complexities associated with development work especially in this part of the world. Taking into account the issues of accountability, professional work ethics, proper documentation, meaningful involvement of stakeholders/ beneficiaries, developing comprehensive project plans, monitoring, and evaluation. In addition, assessing the success trajectory of past projects.

Another interesting observation was getting to understand the cultural dynamics within which the society operate knowing that it tends to have a significant effect on the outcome of development efforts. 

The only thing I found challenging in my time here was the language barrier in communicating with community members and government officials. However, this challenge was not peculiar to foreigners alone but also common within the city enclave which constitutes a wide array of cultural groups with distinct languages. This meant that for every community engagement we had, a minimum of three languages translator’s asides from English had to be present in order to ensure effective and more meaningful engagements.

In a nutshell, the internship provided me the opportunity to work closely on a wide spectrum of development projects to include waste management, water, and sanitation, improved housing and eviction issues, city-wide profiling and mapping, alternative energy, and the Know Your City (KYC) Campaign. Also, I have gained increased capacity in stakeholder mobilization, community engagement, tension management, identifying meaningful communication techniques best suited for grassroots participation. 

The last but not the least, I had the opportunity to learn and work with a group of community youth along side delegates from Slum/Shack Dwellers International (SDI) in first building capacity and producing a video documentary on the activities of GHAFUP to be shown at the upcoming UN-Habitat 3 Conference in October.

Business experience, definitely an asset for a Development Practitioner

By Alejandro Dominguez-Suberbie, 2nd year MDP student

One of many of the activities that we MDP students (Alejandro Dominguez-Suberbie, Susan Maxson, and Ian Toal) did during our placement in Mexico was organizing with RITA a field visit to the state of Hidalgo, where one of the members of RITA, the Red Hñahñu is located. The main objective of the field trip was to get to know this member of the network and their tourism projects. Also, we wanted to conduct an assessment and provide feedback on the organizational and marketing capacity of  Red Hñahñu. This would be beneficial to both the organization and to the Indigenous Tourism directors at RITA.

After the field visit, the three of us designed and implemented a working session with members of the Red Hñahñu. The members requested that the meeting would focus on marketing.

Overall, we saw that the products and services needed more development and testing in order to find the proper market for them. Signage, was a very important topic. A comment underlined the importance of signage, was one that Susan Maxson made “you will never know about the potential customers who have gotten lost on the way to your business." 

We also talked about product development and testing, marketing strategies, and the target market.

At the end of the meeting we passed out a questionnaire related to the communication project we were working on simultaneously regarding RITA’s monthly newsletter. This questionnaire include three questions:

What information do you want to receive from RITA?

What information do you want to receive from other members?

What information do you want to share in the newsletter?

We presented these results to RITA’s board and the project was approved.