Voice and Poverty

There are at least two areas of work that can be considered to be attempting to bring issues of 'voice' to the fore in international development and development communications. On the one hand there is now an established body of work on participatory approaches to understanding poverty, which is concerned to let those who experience poverty tell those who do not what this experience is like, rather than have external 'experts' assess it from afar. On the other hand, in the fields of development communication and ICT for development there is growing attention being paid to the local production of content. The first is about the need to listen to the voices of the poor in order to both understand and tackle poverty. The second is concerned with promoting a diversity of voices through media and communications