P(owe)r in Communicative Practice?

HIV Prevention Communication and the Woza Asibonisane Community Responses Project (WACRP), South Africa

Resumen

The organising logic of communicative practices in social change is the need to acknowledge the moderating influence of power in the attainment of project outcomes. Power relations embedded within HIV prevention responses that incorporate external interest groups and marginalised local communities, can affect “community ownership and “leadership” in projects that are externally funded. Who owns the project if an external agent has leveraged funds for community project? In such circumstances, what does the community ‘owe’ the funder? The orthographical differentiation of (owe) from ‘power’ in this article’s title is an invitation to rethink the application of communication in social change processes executed under the weight of expectations from external stakeholders.

The Woza Asibonisane Community Responses Project (WACRP), an HIV prevention communication project implemented by The Valley Trust (TVT) in informal settlements and rural areas in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa under the auspices of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) is applied as a an illustrative case to explore the conundrum of power in a supposed participatory initiative involving community and external stakeholders. The article reveals that the exercise of power in such externally funded community-led interventions masks what has been described as ceremonial adequacy of institutionalised social change communication programs. We, therefore, argue that for social change to be sustainable, power should be acknowledged, accounted for, and planned for in the conceptualisation, implementation, and evaluation of health communication projects in ways that account for local practices and listening.