Research Without Borders

A CommGAP colleague and I recently spent a week in Kampala, Uganda, to attend a workshop with communication and media research teams from 14 African and Asian countries.  These country teams make up the BBC World Service Trust’s Research & Learning (R&L) Group, headed by Dr. Gerry Power, who also manages an expert group in their London head office. 

More than 15 development-oriented projects were presented during the workshop, including media productions, capacity building and training efforts, and public information and advocacy campaigns. 

Here are some examples of R&L projects under the Governance thematic area:

• BBC Sanglap (Bangladesh) – a television show that brings together members of the public and elites, with citizens asking policy-makers, civil society figures, and independent personalities hard-hitting questions on key issues of the day.  According to the Trust, Sanglap reaches a weekly audience of 7 million and 80% of its audience believes the program has improved political debate in the country.
• Radio Station Capacity Building (Uganda) -- a European Commission-supported project providing audience research support to help radio station managers better understand the value of public opinion findings toward improving programming and increasing listenership.
• Citizen Consultations for Constitution Building (Nepal) – a UNDP-supported effort seeking to enhance participation of citizens through consultations (via focus group discussions) with representatives from a wide range of communities; includes a campaign to encourage citizen participation in the consultations.

Cutting across the various R&L projects is a consistent effort to include the following research and evaluation components throughout project cycles:
 

• Formative research for conceptualization and planning
• Pretesting of messages and production values
• Monitoring of project deliverables during implementation
• Impact evaluation to assess whether the project made a difference
   

It was obvious from both the discussions and informal conversations that these research and evaluation components were a “shared language” among the R&L country teams and head office staff based in London.  The common understanding of research methods and substantive aspects of their work in media and communication enabled efficient sharing of experiences, troubleshooting across country teams, and drawing on varied experiences toward generating potential solutions.

For example, the Nepal team shared some challenges experienced in doing citizen consultations in far-flung areas in support of the country’s constitution building effort.  In some instances, they encountered the “happy problem" of too many people showing up to join the discussions.  A member of another country team suggested that they break up the participants into multiple groups and run discussions in parallel.  They could then ask representatives to report back to the larger group.  In cases where they suspected that the participants were unrepresentative of the subpopulation of interest, a colleague from another country team suggested that they identify and interview opinion leaders in the community to validate the information gathered from the groups. 

There was a lot more methodological detail to these suggestions, but the takeaway I would like to emphasize is that the Nepal team received practical suggestions from colleagues working in other countries who do similar work and come up against comparable challenges.  This productive exchange among country teams was made possible by shared practical expertise in research methodology, on-the-ground experience, and an understanding and appreciation of the contribution of communication processes to pro-poor change.  

The BBC World Service Trust’s Research & Learning team has found a good formula for cross-country collaboration, capacity building, and knowledge sharing.  They demonstrate a determination to continuously build expertise and share lessons learned, increasing their capacity to do serious applied research in places that many other researchers, especially those trained in the best universities in the developed world, might consider too difficult to work in.  The R&L team has proven otherwise.