Information is power, remember?

Take this book in your hands or, if you are all wired up to the Internet, wrap your hands around the electronic edition on your screen and you should feel it vibrate. You will not put it down easily, with its colourful pages and lively texts, as excited as they are exciting. Almost forty examples are described from across communities throughout ACP States of how information projects are helping rural people to change their lives. It is a sensual volume. Just as that saying goes about the pictures being better on the radio, you will find yourself hearing the buzz of a radio drama feeding imaginations, the drone of a television commentator adding data to pictures, the rustle of newspapers quenching the thirst for knowledge, the gabble of a group discussion bringing harmony and ownership to a village group, the bargaining gains of a farmers group improved by up-to-date prices. You will, later on, find yourself wishing that more information could be presented like this, reaching out, touching you. The authors elaborately persuade us that information is a basic element in human interaction, and thus in development. With their eyes and their hands, they inspire us with the ways that literacy work, newspapers, radio, TV, video, telecentres, market information services, Internet and other electronic messaging, resource centres and other media are being used by local communities to take more control over their rural lives and livelihoods, to build new partnerships and priorities with researchers and extension workers, to inform as well as be informed. They call these the Information Revolutions. After every revolution there comes a reckoning, and so it shall be with information. We shall have to face, very soon if not today already, the issues of who controls the media and the content. We also need to persuade those who think in terms of finance, costs and rates of return on investment that there is an equation to be made which shows that investing in information is a good deal. In the meantime, let us be grateful for this tribute to information which proves that information is not just a commodity, not just bits and bytes, but is essentially energy. Get energised. Get this book. Information revolutions: How information and communication management is changing the lives of rural people by P Mundy & J Sultan. CTA. 2001. 241 pp. ISBN 92 9081 2289 CTA number 1037. 40 credit points This publication can also be downloaded in pdf format, free of charge, in chapters, or in a full file of 1.9 Mb from the CTA Website: www.agricta.org/pubs/inforev/index.htm Also available in FrenchInformation revolutions: How information and communication management is changing the lives of rural peopl